I think what I dislike about the setbacktitle command is how specific it is to the dialog frontend, and how it's not clear how or if any other frontends should implement it. Maybe we should generalise a bit from the reason Colin needs it -- the basic need is for a way to give the user information out of band about the overall process they're engaged in using debconf, or perhaps even more generally, any information that they don't really need to explicitly confirm they've read, as they do a note. I can think of a few similar things -- one might be a similar backtitle during an apt upgrade that said "System update" or whatever. Another could be telling the user that a debian installation is running, along with the build version. Perhaps with some additional interesting info, such as an estimated ETA for the entire install. Perhaps, as Pere mentioned, we might want to display some longer texts during the debootstrap process, to give the user something to read. Maybe a little intro to Debian or something. I may be getting too ambitious, but that's a good spectrum of potential uses. I can think of two approaches now: - How about calling the command INFO, and allowing it to display a debconf note (or similar template type): "INFO foo". Probaly only the short description would be displayed, though we could get more ambitous and try to support longer texts if something like a progress bar is all that's being displayed otherwise. Display of the info at all would be up to the frontend, so the information cannot be something the user strictly needs to complete their process, just some additional information. Frontends would attempt to display the info persistently, so it's available for the user to read until some other info comes along. Note the analogy to "PROGRESS INFO". - Or, it could be a template of Type: info, which is displayed via INPUT in the regular way, and the frontend then replaces any previous info it was displaying with the new one. On balance, I prefer the first of these, since it doesn't overload INPUT to perform (yet another) non-input-related action, and it allows more than one type of template to be displayed as info, for future expansion. -- see shy jo
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