Re: Debian is not a "main distro"?

[David Engel <dlengel@home.com>]

On Wed, Sep 30, 1998 at 07:45:38PM -0400, warp@whitestar.soark.net wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 1998 at 08:42:34PM +0100, Enrique Zanardi wrote:
> <snip>
> > - "unnecesary interaction": Unattended installation is one of our
> >   long-term goals, but we still don't have a clear way to implement it.
> >   In the mean time, we should deprecate "too interactive" maintainer scripts.
> >   But our policy says exactly the opposite! (There's a paragraph
> >   suggesting that any script displaying vitally important information
> >   should wait for the user to press a key).
> 
> I would suggest having two diffrent sets of pre/post inst/rm scripts.
> One for interactive and one for non-interactive..

Here's another idea.  Rather than have two versions of scripts, have
one that checks for the presence of an environment variable or file.
If the variable or file is present, then the script would default to
safe/sane choices whenever possible instead of prompting the user.
The install disks or even the user would be responsible for setting
the variable of file as desired.  Until we have a full blown
pre-configuration scheme (which I suspect we won't for a long time), a
scheme like this would give us the best of both worlds -- a highly
interactive install like we currently have and a streamlined install
like redhat has.

David
-- 
David Engel
dlengel@home.com