Bug#174360: some comments on your solutions

[Zefram <zefram@fysh.org>]

Joshua Kwan wrote:
>See, this is the kind of thing that alienates newbies. Something they
>don't understand is "fully-qualified or unqualified" and explaining it
>is an exercise in futility.

Hmm.  I think that's just a wording problem; there's probably some way
to successfully say "if you don't know what "qualified" means in this
context then don't worry".  Still, leaving that explanation out and just
silently accepting both forms seems OK to me.

>But why not just silently figure out whether to ask the domain question
>or not?
>
>if (not_qualified)
>{
>  debconf_input(client, "high", "netcfg/get_domain")
>  [...]
>}
>else
>{
>  [continue on with life]
>}

Yes.  That's what I proposed.

>>     3. What domains should be searched to look up unqualified hostnames?
...
>This should be ignored if DHCP was successful.

If DHCP was successful then it might also provide a hostname, and DNS
servers, and so on.  I agree that questions shouldn't be presented
for things that DHCP provided.  Some way to explicitly request those
questions might be nice, but I really haven't considered the DHCP case.

>                                               And even if we only used
>static configuration, we should just extract the top level domain part
>of the FQDN. I.E.

I disagree with this.  That should be the default, because it's the most
common configuration, but it's perfectly legitimate to use a different
search path.  It ought to be possible to configure this by the same
mechanism as the rest of the basic network configuration.

That is, however, a matter of opinion.  It's not fundamentally broken
to not provide this configuration option; it just requires the user to
hack /etc/resolv.conf to get a non-default configuration.

-zefram