Re: Debconf or not debconf
On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 08:53:57PM -0400, Joe Drew wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 14:00, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > This kind of thing would go in the hypothetical NEWS.Debian, but
> > unfortunately I haven't gotten around to implementing support for it in
> > apt-listchanges yet.
>
> Having just implemented support for NEWS.Debian in apt-listchanges (see
> 192089), and being generally against debconf notes, I disagree that in
> this case debconf should be avoided. This is not news; it requires
> changes from the system administrator.
>
> This is a similar situation. There is, by the admission of the
> maintainer, no good way to convert between the 'old way' of running
> stunnel and the new way. Should this truly be the case, debconf should
> be used to warn the admin that stunnel will need configuration changes
> before it will function.
I confess to not having looked at the original example in detail. My
feeling is that only items which require operator intervention, or otherwise
will cause things to unavoidably break, should be displayed as notes.
This seems to fall in this category.
It is a common mistake, for some reason, to display this kind of note
without checking to see whether the user is upgrading from an older version.
I have seen several notes like this displayed on initial installation, and I
find it very disruptive. In particular, the binutils warning displayed
every time I install woody.
--
- mdz
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