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Re: Little things make the initial install experience painful



On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 12:01:30AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> > I've heard the criticism before that many packages seem to ask all
> > questions at priority high, and there seems to be some truth to this.[1]

> I have been worried about priority inflation for a while. How about I
> make debconf actually display somehow what priorities it is asking a
> question at? This would at least make it obvious when
> insiginificat-package uses priority critical to display the
> insignificant-package/should-be-in-readme-debian note. I'm not quite
> sure how to fit that into all the UIs though.

Yes, I thought it might be an aid to developers, if the version of
debconf in testing/unstable displayed this information.  Even if just a
few of the most commonly used UIs supported it, I'm sure we'd start to
see the benefits.

Another thing that I feel is missing is a set of clear guidelines
describing how each of the debconf priorities should be used.  I have my
own ideas about this, which may or may not agree with the ideas of the
debconf author and certainly don't agree with current practices within
Debian.  If such a set of guidelines does exist, clearly I'm unaware of
their existence -- which means, IMHO, that they haven't been announced
as prominently as they should be.

> This doesn't even happen anymore; debconf is now installed by
> debootstrap as part of base, and so its configuration is never displayed
> to the user; you just get medium. If you have set up the boot floppies
> to work in "quiet" mode (via some hard to find switch which I forget),
> you get priority critical instead; if you make the boot floppies enter
> "verbose" mode, you get low priority.

So, the correct approach for someone wishing to target a large number of
novice users with Woody would be to set this to "high" in the installer
configuration?

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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