Re: Outcome of Custom Debian Distro Workshop in Florence

[Andreas Schuldei <andreas@schuldei.org>]

* Petter Reinholdtsen (pere@hungry.com) [040928 21:30]:
> [... about cooperation with cdd ...]

i talked to enrico zini the other day and he suggested to make
all the debian-edu components modular. this would mean that it is
possible to use parts of our system as nicely preconfigured as
they come in our system.

for that we need to get debconf pre-seeding to work at package
installation time, not just for from-scratch installations.
pre-seeding needs to happen *before* any of the packages which we
want to configure are unpacked. However, with debians dependency
mechanism there is no way to achive that. what we would need is
to declare a new reverse pre-dependendy of all the packages which
are to be configured upon the pre-seeding package. Today there is
no way to declare such a dependency after the fact (meaning:
after building those packages).

I conclude that for broader technical cooperation between
customized debian distros with code and configuration re-use we
need changes in dpkg which allow for this.