Re: When to use debconf, and how much?
frank@kuesterei.ch (=?utf-8?b?RnJhbmsgS8O8c3Rlcg==?=) writes:
> Hello all,
>
> If there is no working configuration, networking will problably not work
> at all - this is bad, especially if by bad chance somebody installs the
> package on a remotely administered machine. Therefore one option would
> be to just install the package, but not make links to its init script.
Very bad, considered a bug by most.
> On the other hand, practically every user that installs it on purpose
> would be happy to find a working package, with the configuration based
> on what he had before. He then can add others manually, using the first
> as an example.
>
> So this is the situation, but how should it get to a working
> configuration? Unfortunately this is not possible without asking. The
> old package asked questions in postinst, but the resulting configuration
> worked only on laptops with PCMCIA cards, not with builtin network
> adaptors. Furthermore, the automatic parsing of the existent
> configuration didn't do so well (see the bug reports).
>
> So I introduced debconf which does the following:
>
> - Check wether there's an old configuration, if yes, do nothing, but
> inform the user; and ask him wether this information should be skipped
> upon future updates.
check out ucf if you have generated config files.
> - Ask wether the laptop uses PCMCIA or not.
Check the config, don't ask. This one is unneccessary.
> If yes, /etc/pcmcia/network.opts should contain the necessary
> information, it is parsed.
>
> If no a scheme is set up based on /etc/network/interfaces and
> /etc/resolv.conf
>
> - Check if everything went well, if not disable use on boot time.
Above you said multiple choises would be generated. You could generate
a list of what you found and let the user choose one config. The list
should contain <don't handle this with debconf> and probably <leave
unconfigured for now>. I assume after configuring this would disrupt
the network and it might be a bad time.
> My sponsor now questioned wether it's good to use debconf here at all,
> but he wasn't so sure that he would tell me "kick that out". So I'm
> wondering what I should do: Disable and ask nothing (and hope that users
> will find the Debian sections I added to the html documentation), or
> keep asking debconf questions?
If you can get the autoconfig right often make it try to do
so. Depending on how little failure there is the priority should be
selected. If you say you can correctly set this up for 99.99% of users
a very low priority should be used.
MfG
Goswin
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