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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