Re: Debconf or not debconf

[Mark Brown <broonie@sirena.org.uk>]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 08:40:02PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:

> It does not belong in debconf.  Put it in the changelog -- users who
> want to know what's changing on their system should be looking there
> anyway, and tools such as apt-listchanges make it easier and ever to
> access changelog information.

The changelog is really not a good way of telling users about changes
like this, particularly when you consider things like upgrades between
different stable versions.  It's a non-default thing to have it visible
during upgrades and it's very easy to get vast quanitities of
information displayed with more important things like this getting lost
in the flow.

> Does the introduction of /etc/default/stunnel break a large percentage
> of installed systems?  If so, I would recommend looking for a way to
> provide a more graceful upgrade -- this is worth much more than a note
> telling users that you've just broken their systems...

I do agree with this - if we've got a flood of messages saying that the
existing configuration has been broken then we ought to be looking at
ways to avoid doing that, particularly in cases like this where there
isn't something like a new upstream configuration format to handle.

-- 
"You grabbed my hand and we fell into it, like a daydream - or a fever."