On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 02:52:43PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote: > Ok, here's the way I see things happening. We use discover and friends > to populate the debconf database, like you do now in the xserver-xfree86 > .config script. We only ask the user to confirm at a priority of > "low". The default for the confirm question is "yes". Medium. Things can be autodetected wrongly. "Low" is for things that can't really be "wrong", just annoying to nitpicky people. > After XFree86 is installed, if it succeeds (as we should strive to make > sure it does for as many possible setups as we can), then we're all > good. > Now, if it fails, we touch a file like > /etc/X11/x-server-autoconfiguration-failed, and use curses to prompt the > user with something like: > "The graphics system (X server) failed to start: > [ include contents of tail -8 /var/log/XFree86.0.log ] > Do you want to rerun the configuration wizard?" PGI already does something similar to what you describe. I've been asked to add a "Test X server configuration" button to the X server configlet. This could be added to the postinst script, too: false by default and only asked at medium priority. Or we could just let installers fool with that. Guess I'll be needing to add "back" support to the X server config script while I'm at it. Sigh, sigh. > If they say yes, we exec "dpkg-reconfigure --plow --priority=low > xserver-xfree86". After this, we try to start X again. If it succeeds, > we rm /etc/X11/x-server-autoconfiguration-failed, and again we're good. > If it fails, then we just give up, inform the user appropriately, and > touch a file like /etc/X11/x-server-unconfigured. Login managers like > GDM can look for this file, and refuse to start if it exists. We long ago solved the looping display manager problem, so it's just as well to let the display managers fail. They won't tie up the system for long and they let the display managers start again on a good configuration even if something is stupid and leaves the /etc/X11/x-server-unconfigured file around. -- G. Branden Robinson | A committee is a life form with six Debian GNU/Linux | or more legs and no brain. branden@debian.org | -- Robert Heinlein http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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