Re: Bug#176506: Make debconf mandatory for prompting the user

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 09:49:43AM +1100, Brian May wrote:
>...
> One potential point of confusion (judging from other E-Mails), if
> debconf is made mandatory for prompting the user, does this mean
> packages cannot use conffiles anymore?
> 
> I suspect that packages that use only conffiles and no maintainer
> scripts that ask for input can go unchanged, as the prompting would then
> be dpkg's fault. Am I right?

debconf has nothing to do with conffiles.

dpkg's questions regarding changed conffiles are something different.

You can get a list of all locally modified conffiles of a running system 
and use dpkg's --force-confnew/--force-confold options to get a 
non-interactive installation.

This needs handling, but with all packages using debconf when prompting
the user there were only few packages/programs that are your interface
you base your logic upon (debconf/dpkg/apt) and this is _much_ easier
than starting to special case every single package prompting the user
without using debconf.

> Brian May <bam@debian.org>

cu
Adrian

BTW: Please Cc me on replies.

-- 

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       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
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