Re: How do we encourage bug reports?

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

> Perhaps you could think over the whole thing and how we could arrange
> to have an installation without the need to answer questions.

The main thing to do is to separate the question asking from the other scripts.

SVR4's package system does this by having a request script for each package 
that needs it.  This is the only install script that is allowed access to the 
tty, so you cannot prompt the user in postinst etc.

The request scripts are run first, and produce name=value shell assignments on 
their stdout --- this is saved in a response file so that they can be used in 
the pre/postrm as well as in the pre/postinst.

You can take the response files from an installed system, and skip the 
question answering phase.

Obviously, we could do better than this, by having the request script populate 
a configuration database, but that is just an implementation detail.  If we 
provide a couple of programs set_conf_val and get_conf_val for the scripts to 
use, then the implementation won't affect the scripts anyway.

The problems that need to be solved are:
  unpacking all the request scripts early enough to run them all before the
  first pre-inst;
  and making the request scripts able to diagnose what questions to ask,
  when many other packages may not be installed yet.

Cheers, Phil. 





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