Re: When to use debconf, and how much?
Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> schrieb:
> 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.
Good to know. Can you give some references, so that I can convince my
sponsor, if needed?
>> 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.
Thank you, I'll do that.
>> - Ask wether the laptop uses PCMCIA or not.
>
> Check the config, don't ask. This one is unneccessary.
How can I check this? I found the PCMCIAe setup rather complicated. As
far as I see, cardmgr is used for any PCMCIA card, not only network
cards. Can cardctl be used to figure that out?
>> 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.
No, I was not clear enough about that. Of course the purpose of the
package is to provide a couple of choices. But when it is first
installed, there's usually only one network configuration
configured. What I want to do upon installation is set up netenv so that
it uses this as its default configuration (and for now the only
one). The user then has to generate more if he really wants to be able
to switch. But at least netenv is in a usable state. If it isn't, it
will wait for user input on every boot, and offer upstreams "Generate a
new configuration". However, this works only for PCMCIA cards and has no
effect at all if an onboard NIC is used. Therefore it is bad to have no
configuration, even if remote booting is not necessary.
> You could generate
> a list of what you found and let the user choose one config.
If I can safely decide between PCMCIA and onboard, I can parse the
config files and find _one_ configuration: The one set up the standard
Debian manner. Wether there's an other one, be it hand-taylored or left
from a different network-choosing program, is hard to find out; I think
I shouldn't rely on recognizing syntax or filenames of other programs I
don't use.
Thank you for your comments,
Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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