Re: installation report
On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> >> [during installation of a new Debian system - select All packages]
> >> No conversation at all should occur while files are being installed on-disk.
> >> On the other hand, no daemons or so should be started without confirmation.
> >> A security risk.
>
> > Do not install those packages, then.
>
> Wrong answer.
I did not mean to give the "right" answer but the "standard" one for
this problem, but there may be other possible answers.
If you do not want any services enabled by default but still you want
to install a lot of packages you don't even know what they are for,
you could probably achieve that by having simple do-nothing wrappers
for update-inetd and start-stop-daemon (not that I would recommend
doing that, but it would be interesting to know how that would work).
By the way, you can't install "all" packages because very often there are
conflicts between them, but there is a rule in our policy saying there
should not be conflicts among packages of optional priority or higher.
What you should be able to do is to install all optional or higher packages.
If you can't, that would be a bug.
In your case, if you want to propose that any package providing a
service should be of "extra" priority, go ahead, but I believe the
extra priority was not created to avoid people installing packages
providing services when they install all optional or higher packages.
> I do not install "those packages". I install "All". The number of
> packages will slowly grow and it will become less and less feasible
> to start a conversation about individual ones.
That's what debconf non-interactive interface was designed for.
Currently, not all packages which ask questions use debconf, but that's
one of our goals. If you see a package in unstable which does not use
debconf when it would be appropriate to do so, that's a bug.
> Selecting "All" during installation is a much weaker commitment
> than something like "apt-get install". It does not follow that I
> know what the package is or does, or that I want to use it, or that I
> want to configure it.
In Debian, installing a package means both unpacking it and configuring it.
It's possible that "install" has different meanings on different systems,
but that's the meaning it has in Debian.
> > What you seem to expect is probably against Debian philosophy.
>
> If so, then perhaps Debian philosophy will have to change.
Well, most of our users appreciate that installing a package leaves it
in a configured state.
Please try debconf's non-interactive mode and/or setting debconf
priority level to "critical".
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