Re: Announcing debconf, configuration management for debian

[Scott Barker <scott@mostlylinux.ab.ca>]

On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 01:23:50PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote:
> It's now possible in two ways. First, there is the dpkg-reconfigure program,
> which you pass a package name, and it lets you see all the questions again. 

Excellent. Hopefully if debconf gets folded into the base system, dpkg itself
will be able to run this directly, rather than it be an extra step for the
user. For example, instead of running (manually, or through apt):

dpkg -i <package>
dpkg-reconfigure

you could just run:

dpkg -i --reconfigure <package>

I'm probably thinking too far ahead right now, though...

> dpkg-repack couldn't currently handle this, and I'd have to modify it to
> know about debconf for it to be able to.
> 
> A better approach, perhaps, will be to use the remote database capabilities
> of debconf to just pull settings off the old system when you install a
> package on the new one. Of course, that's all vaporware at this point.

I guess I'm just too eager to roll this out in my labs, and I want that
vaporware void filled :)

How do you feel about moving the template file out of the debian/ control
structure, and into the filesystem? If it was /etc/debconf/<package> instead
of debian/templates, dpkg-repack could handle it (and I could start
repackaging packages for use in my labs).

I don't mean to be pushy, I'm just very excited at the prospect of removing
RedHat and replacing it with Debian on all my workstations.

-- 
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