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Re: We need easier installation.



On Mon, Oct 26, 1998 at 10:48:17AM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 1998 at 09:39:03AM +0000, Martin Alonso Soto wrote:
> 
> > Marc Singer <elf@netcom.com> wrote:
> > >   2) Smooth install.  All the questions must be asked up front or at
> > >      the end.
> > 
> > Some days ago, David Engel proposed an idea that IMO is worth
> > considering.  It consists in making interactivity in package scripts
> > conditional by using an environment variable.  If the variable is not
> > defined, the scripts will take their current behavior, i. e. asking
> > all of the questions during the installation face.  If the variable is
> > defined, the scripts will only try to leave the package in a stable
> > state (not necessarily operational, though) without asking any
> > questions.  New versions of dpkg/apt could start offering an option
> > for defining this variable (or you could define it by hand) without
> > breaking backwards compatibility.
> 
> Sounds pretty good.  I guess we should recommend that any packages with
> interactive configuration scripts (which are a good thing, just timed wrong
> at the moment) split them out into a separate file... or move them to a new
> postinst option, say "postconfig".
> 
> Hmm, now that I think of it, the environment variable will be rather
> inconvenient: it makes it easy to non-interactively configure packages
> during installation, but hard to interactively configure them later :)
> 
> Maybe we should just have a "reconfigure" option to postinst, and have a
> separate program to call that after installing.  eg:
> 
> 	reconfigure smail
> 		or
> 	dpkg-reconfig smail
> 	
> And that will just run /var/lib/dpkg/info/smail.postinst reconfigure.

what about dpkg --reconfigure smail doing this ?

Friendly,

Sven LUTHER


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