Re: We need easier installation.
Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@worldvisions.ca> wrote:
> 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.
I like this idea a lot, although it has the problem of somewhat
breaking backwards compatibility (people are used to package scripts
that actually do configuration). Maybe a combined approach would work
better: If the variable is not defined, let postinst work as usual
(i.e do basic configuration and then reconfigure). If the variable is
defined, just do the basic configuration and delay reconfigure for a
later time.
> The transition period would be a bit strange ('configure' postinsts would
> still be interactive, some of the time) but that's true of the environment
> variable too...
Not a big deal, IMHO.
> This would be pretty easy to implement, though. I don't think we'd need any
> special support from dpkg. Hmm...
That's right. But I guess a policy change is needed to actually
achieve the transition. I don't know what the next step is, though?
Do I have to submit a formal proposal to Debian policy, or something
like that?
Regards,
M. S.
------------
Martin A. Soto J. Profesor
Departamento de Ingenieria de Sistemas y Computacion
Universidad de los Andes masoto@uniandes.edu.co
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