Re: [custom] Some issues for custom debian distributions
* Tore Anderson
>> God, No! There's far too many Debconf questions being asked by
>> various Debian packages already, IMNSHO.
* Petter Reinholdtsen
> There is no reason for you to get religious over this question.
>
> The nice thing about debconf is that there is no _need_ to present all
> options as questions. One can like ntp fetch the value from debconf
> without asking the question first. This will make it possible to
> control the details of the package configuration without needing to
> ask a lot of questions to the user while installing it.
Which is why I suggested these "questions" should not be shown to the
user at all, but merely exist as default values that could be
over-ridden by custom distributions such as Skulelinux.
However, doing so would remove the conffile status of many configuration
files, which I firmly (perhaps not religious, though) believe is a bad
thing. If a configuration file *can* be a conffile, it should.
I am sceptical to endorsing use of Debconf for packages that can be
shipped with sane defaults (even though these might not suit Skulelinux
well), as I've seen far too many packages which ask Debconf questions
way out of proportion, carelessly ignore policy 11.7.3 (cf. the "manage
with Debconf madness" thread), etc. So even though it is possible to
configure as much as possible through Debconf without actually asking
too many questions and still caring for user modifications, I seriously
this is the way it actually will be done.
Thus I would rather see Skulelinux divert away unfitting conffiles.
--
Tore Anderson
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