setup_kernels_arches should not call rpm on Debian/Ubuntu based distros

[anbe42]

If the distribution is based on Debian/Ubuntu, dkms should not make any calls to rpm.
There are currently unguarded calls in setup_kernels_arches and do_uninstall.

There is an unwanted side effect of creating an empty rpmdb in /.rpmdb/ or /root/.rpmdb/ on Debian and derivatives when performing rpm queries and rpm is installed.

[evelikov]

Glancing at the two uses:

• the ia32e in setup_kernels_arches was added ~15 years ago with 5a9c77b by @superchalupa.

Michael do you recall what distro/version it's aimed at, is it still relevant?

Edit: fwiw actual rpm invocations around ia32e were introduced by 3abe63b, although one can remove the whole block if the Arch is no longer supported/relevant.

• while the do_uninstall reference is more recent 79fc855 by @vt-alt.

What are the side-effects of removing the (empty) folder when it's owned by rpm? Should we do a similar check for other package manageds - yum, apt, pacman, etc? I don't think such a check scales well, plus my gut feeling is that this might be a workaround for broken package.

[anbe42]

a possible solution: anbe42@096979d
this adds a case "$running_distribution" in around rpm usage but does not try to reimplement the rpm usage with dkms/pacman, not yet tested ;-)

[evelikov]

Our ultimate goal is to remove all running_distribution instances. Iff needed a config toggle can be used to control the code flow. Considering the side effect is couple of empty directories, I'm not in favour of adding more.

[evelikov]

I've added the required notes to the "move distro specifics into the config" task and I'll be closing this in favour of it.

Hope that's OK, I see you've got a local workaround in Debian for the short term.