Re: Bug#5572: infelicitous overriding of lilo.conf by kernel-image

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@datasync.com>]

Hi,

	Umm, I disagree.  (pardon me if this seems a tad abrupt, I did
 not mean this to sound that way) The output of lilo is not critical
 information unless lilo fails. We do run lilo in test mode first to
 make sure that things parse ok. And we do preserve output in case
 there was an error running LILO, and pause to make sure that the user
 knows about the LILO error. 

	If someone needs to see LILO output, they could just type lilo
 after the install, all output will be repeated, but this should not
 be forced for every one.

	This, by the way, is not just an opinion, but also part of
 Debian policy:

3.5 Maintainer scripts

   The package installation scripts should avoid producing output which
   it is unnecessary for the user to see and should rely on dpkg to stave
   off boredom on the part of a user installing many packages. This
   means, amongst other things, using the --quiet option on install-info.

   Packages should try to minimise the amount of prompting they need to
   do, and they should ensure that the user will only every be asked each
   question once. This means that packages should try to use appropriate
   shared configuration files (such as /etc/papersize and             
   /etc/news/server, rather than each prompting for their own list of
   required pieces of information.

   It also means that an upgrade should not ask the same questions again,
   unless the user has used dpkg --purge to remove the package's
   configuration. The answers to configuration questions should be stored
   in an appropriate place in /etc so that the user can modify them, and
   how this has been done should be documented.

   If a package has a vitally important piece of information to pass to
   the user (such as "don't run me as I am, you must edit the following
   configuration files first or you risk your system emitting
   badly-formatted messages"), it should display this in the postinst
   script and prompt the user to hit return to acknowledge the message.
   Copyright messages do not count as vitally important (they belong in
   /usr/doc/copyright); neither do instructions on how to use a program
   (these should be in on line documentation, where all the users can see
   them).                                                  

   Any necessary prompting should almost always be confined to the
   post-installation script, and should be protected with a conditional
   so that unnecssary prompting doesn't happen if a package's
   installation fails and the postinst is called with abort-upgrade,     
   abort-remove or abort-deconfigure.       

   Errors which occur during the execution of an installation script must
   be checked and the installation must not continue after an error.

   The section below on scripts in general applies to package maintainer
   scripts too.                            

	manoj
-- 
Manoj Srivastava                                     <srivasta@datasync.com>


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