Re: stop the "manage with debconf" madness
On 18-Apr-03, 10:28 (CDT), Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net> wrote:
> 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,
If it has a reasonable default, then it should be defaulted. You should
not ask questions about it. That's what Debian policy says. If you don't
like this, then get policy changed.
In particular, if you start asking questions about defaultable
configuration values, then you can't make the file a conffile. Debian
conffile handling is one of the great things about Debian. Breaking that
is A Bad Thing(tm).
> > 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.
But only if that assent is obtained each and every time, not by checking
what the admin answered 8 months ago on the original install. And the
whole thing is better handled using conffiles, where I can diff and
merge the changes, when it's convenient for me, rather than hiding them
scripts in the middle of a massive upgrade.
Steve
--
Steve Greenland
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
world. -- seen on the net
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