Bug#212881: Noninteractive patch for cdebconf

[Alex Mohr <alexander.mohr@stonybrook.edu>]

Denis wrote:
> If this frontend does not display anything to the user, why should
> these templates be translated?

On Sat, 5 Feb 2005, Colin Watson wrote:
> How does this differ from the 'none' frontend? (Serious question, I'm
> not sure.)

This noninteractive frontend does display things to the user -- it's
very similar to a normal frontend=text install, but never asks the
user for input.  If a value has been preseeded, it won't ask a
question about it.  However, for questions without preseeded answers
and a priority >= the current value, it displays the question using
the same format as frontend=text but will answer it using the default
value (or if there is no default, chooses something "reasonable" like
the first entry on the list).

To answer the question about translations, to be honest, I wasn't
thinking of how much work would be involved in translating them.  The
templates are similar to frontend=text but reflect the noninteractive
nature of the install.  For example, instead of "Prompt: Question
default='%s'> " it has "Using default '%s'".  I certainly wouldn't
mind if they were simplified to make translation easier.

As for the 'none' frontend, I didn't know it existed.  There's no
module for it and I didn't see it in the docs -- could easily be
my mistake though.  I can't test it right now to see how it works,
but I'll assume that it doesn't ask questions and doesn't show you
the answers it uses from my glance through the code.

Here are some reasons why you might prefer this version:
- It's noninteractive, not completely silent, so you can see what it's doing.
- If an install goes bad, you can check the log to see what questions
were asked and what answers were given.
- If you set up preseed values for all the questions at some point
in time, then it's quite clear when new questions are added in the
future because they'll appear in the log along with the default value
that was used.  If you don't like it, you can update your preseed config.
- It comes in a module like all of the others and so might be easier
to update as new noninteractive feature requests come in.

Hope that helps,
Alex