Bug#189370: marked as done (stop the "manage with debconf" madness)
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Received: (at submit) by bugs.debian.org; 16 Apr 2003 23:10:03 +0000
>From walters@debian.org Wed Apr 16 18:10:03 2003
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Subject: stop the "manage with debconf" madness
From: Colin Walters <walters@debian.org>
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
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Package: laptop-net
Severity: serious
I just installed "laptop-net", becuase it looked similar to something
I'd like to work on.
The first thing it asked me was whether I wanted to "manage" its
configuration file with Debconf, and it defaulted to "yes"!
This behavior needs to stop, now. It is a violation of Policy, section
11.7.3, which states that local changes must be preserved during a
package upgrade.
Debconf is NOT a license to overwrite user's configurations! =20
Yes, I am quite aware that XFree86 does this. We as a project have
accepted that XFree86 does it because parsing XF86Config perfectly and
preserving changes is very difficult. But that doesn't mean that every
package can do it. And hopefully the X maintainer is working on a
solution for XFree86.
First of all, these questions CANNOT default to yes. If my debconf
priority is higher than the question, then I won't even see it, and I
won't know that I've just given the package a license to destroy my
local changes.
I propose a different solution to this problem, which conforms much more
with policy, while still allowing debconf to be used as much as
possible.
In my fontconfig packages, /etc/fonts/local.conf is a configuration file
(not a conffile). When the in fontconfig.config, I check to see whether
that file exists. If it does, then I don't ask any questions at all.=20
That way we never overwrite their config file.
Now, I also have special support for "dpkg-reconfigure". Inside
fontconfig.conf, I check to see if $1 is "reconfigure". If it is, and
/etc/fonts/local.conf exists, then I warn the user that continuing will
overwrite all their changes. The default is no. =20
Now, it might be nice to have generic support in debconf for handling
configuration file overwriting. So I could say like:
db_overwrite_warning /etc/fonts/local.conf
And debconf would handle the prompt, so we wouldn't have to have to
handle it individually in each package. Or maybe we could have a
separate file like debian/fontconfig.debconf_config_files.
But that's just making things a bit nicer. In the meantime, I will be
filing serious bugs against packages which have "manage with debconf"
prompts (except XFree86), ESPECIALLY the ones which default to yes.
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Received: (at 189370-done) by bugs.debian.org; 17 Apr 2003 23:39:40 +0000
>From kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp Thu Apr 17 18:39:40 2003
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Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 08:39:34 +0900 (JST)
Message-Id: <20030418.083934.07642751.kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>
To: 189370-done@bugs.debian.org
Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: irrelevant
From: Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>
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Hi,
Did you really investigate tetex-bin? It is completely
irrelevant with the current problem you claimed, I believe.
It doesn't modify any conffile but only asks how to set
permissions of a file and/or asks which hyphenation pattern
to load.
Further,
The first thing it asked me was whether I wanted to "manage" its
configuration file with Debconf, and it defaulted to "yes"!
this doesn't immediately mean always
This behavior needs to stop, now. It is a violation of Policy, section
11.7.3, which states that local changes must be preserved during a
package upgrade.
It would be possible to preserve local changes with debconf
in some cases, IMHO, and there might be good reason to set
default answer to "yes".
But that's just making things a bit nicer. In the meantime, I will be
filing serious bugs against packages which have "manage with debconf"
prompts (except XFree86), ESPECIALLY the ones which default to yes.
Why except only XFree86? Do you really know every other
packages situation well enough?
I believe we should be, generally, more flexible with conffile
handling. We need to reset a computer sometimes...
Thanks, 2003.4.18(Fri)
--
Debian Developer & Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@debian.org>
Department of Math., Univ. of Tokushima
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