On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 09:28:07AM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote: > On 16-Apr-03, 18:08 (CDT), Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> wrote: > > Debconf is NOT a license to overwrite user's configurations! > You've correctly identified the problem. > > I propose a different solution to this problem, which conforms much more > > with policy, while still allowing debconf to be used as much as > > possible. > But that's not the solution. > Debconf is *NOT* a general purpose configuration tool. Debconf is > *ONLY* a standardized way of interacting with the user during package > installation, for configuration values that *CANNOT* be reasonably > defaulted. If the package maintainers are correctly using the debconf priorities, and the admin has chosen a debconf priority that accurately reflects their preferences, why do you care? By definition, any prompts at priority medium or lower have reasonable defaults, so unless they're shown to the admin *at his choice*, and the admin actively *chooses* a non-default value, the configuration file won't be changed anyway. Now, if there are questions being asked at priority high or higher that have reasonable defaults, those are bugs. I've had a few of these myself, but no worries -- file and fix, and move on. OTOH, if you're running debconf with a priority preference of medium or lower... RTFM. > That's it. Any other use is a clear violation of Debian configuration > file policy. In particular, using debconf to modify existing > configuration files, whether conffiles or not, is wrong. This claim is not reflected in our actual policy. It's perfectly valid for a maintainer script to make changes to non-conffile config file in response to a user's expression of assent. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
Attachment:
pgp76aphMjufw.pgp
Description: PGP signature