>>>>> "MB" == Martin Bialasinski <martin@internet-treff.uni-koeln.de> writes:
MB> I don't fuly understand this: Do you suggest these files
MB> should also hold the value this variable should use, so that
MB> the postinst script would use the value instead asking the
MB> user?
Nope. This doesn't address the database storage issue at all. All
that I'm doing is suggesting a first cut at the interface that package
maintainers should be using. For now, it should offer, at minimum,
exactly the functionality they get by writing things manually. Once
there's an interface, it's a simple matter to write backends to query
a database instead of the user.
I'll append a very simple script that demonstrates this. All that it
does is allows a postinst script to say
visiblehostname=`dpkg-config string Mail/VisibleHostname`
rather than
echo "What should your visible hostname be?"
read visiblehostname
The point of the exercise is that they work in exactly the same way,
but one lets us swap in a database for the backend, while the other
one doesn't. It also lets us ask configuration questions by popping up
a window if under X, or dumping questions out through the speaker and
reading responses in from a mic. It's abstract.
m.
PS: The first argument to this isn't currently used, but it could be
for things like popping up dialog boxes with a known list of options
(eg dpkg-config configured-interfaces Net/DHCP/BroadcastInterface)
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