Now important is DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive support?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

Hello

I'm currently working on a project to make a Debian/Woody based
distribution for the Norwegian primary schools.  Information on the
project is available from
<URL:http://developer.skolelinux.no/projectinfo.html.en>.

As part of this project, we want to be able to install Debian almost
without any questions, and thus it is important for us that the
packages can be installed using DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive.
Several packages of the packages we plan to include do not handle
this, and I've submitted a few bugs asking for the packages to support
debconf.

 postgresql #127960
 gpm #48459
 ispell-dictionaries #123641 and http://dict-common.sourceforge.net/
 php4 #122353
 samba #127959
 exim #86210 (party fixed in #134379)
 webalizer #127904
 vold #128014

The question I have is simple.  How important is it that packages
handle DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive?  Should all packages in Woody
be able to install noninteractively?

How important is it that programs use debconf?  Most of the bugs above
have severity wishlist, and some of the packages plan to convert to
debconf after Woody is released.