It turns out that my last patch (Patch: Make Pacman 5 call etckeeper hooks as late as possible) was not perfect after all.
Calling both the pre-transaction and the post-transaction hook as late as possible seemed to make sense at the time, but now that I think about it, I would say that only the post-transaction hook should be called after all other hooks; the pre-transaction hook should be called as early as possible.
That way, the pre-transaction hook can make sure that...
- ...everything in
/etcgets committed before any other hook gets the chance to introduce more changes (therefore making any changes made by other hooks part of the post-transaction commit) and... - ...it can abort the transaction and thus all hooks that come after the pre-transaction hook if
/etcis not clean and the user wants to prevent the package manager from running in that case. This prevents any later hooks from making changes that should not be made in the first place (since the entire transaction is being aborted due to a dirty/etc).
My patch which makes Pacman call the pre-transaction hook as early as possible can be found here: https://github.com/Tblue/etckeeper/commit/6ff4f922cd34689e0d61359ebd822af5f82c40a6.patch
Hopefully, this will be the last patch related to the Pacman hooks for some time... Sorry for the noise.