Re: We need easier installation.

[Daniel Martin <dtm12@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@datasync.com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> 	Please look at the archives of Debian-policy, where Ian just
>  reopened discussion about exactly how one may do a non-interactive
>  install. The idea is not to have poorly installed or misconfigured
>  packages, really, and just ignoring questions would lead to just
>  that. 
> 
> 	I think this is important enough to do it right.
> 
> 	manoj

Agreed; a simple environment variable is not the best way to do it.

Actually, what people are talking about here (non-interactive
installation with deferred configuration) could probably be handled by
rewriting a dselect method to do only dpkg --unpack, assuming no
preinst scripts are interactive, and then doing a dpkg --pending
--configure later.  That would make things ugly indeed.

However, it would be nice to include in Ian's proposal an environment
variable defined/not defined depending on whether or not one is
dealing with an interactivity-sensitive dpkg.  Otherwise, I might end
up doing:

if dpkg --compare-versions `dpkg --version | sed '1s/.*version \([^ ]*\) .*/\1/;1!d'` le cutoff.dpkg.version ;
then
  DPKG-CONFIG=yes
else
  DPKG-CONFIG=no
fi

Highly ugly, even if better sed hackers than I can improve the sed
script there.