On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 23:17 +0200, Ram Kumar DANGETI wrote: > Hi, > Is there a way to disable whiptail from showing up when we > install some package. In my case, Iam working on a application which > chroots into another image directory and do apt-get install lilo. > During this process, even if I use "apt-get -y", by default > "Configuring lilo" dialog box is displayed in the console and never > seem to accept any keyboard input. I had to kill whiptail manually to > proceed. > I dont think this sort of messages are useful in my app and is > there a way to disable this ?? .Anyway I would to know the reason why > my console freezes or stops accepting keyboard input in this case. This also happens when you're installing under Synaptic: you can even see how it pollutes the error messages in the synaptic error message box with vain attempts at formatting a screen: I hate this stuff because it clears out a valuable sequential log. Whiptail works fine if you're installing on a console using apt though (well I think it does :) however during a *real* ubuntu install it is a badly broken idea. It doesn't handle errors properly: if you cancel, the background batch install just keeps running, sometimes spewing errors all over the place. At the end, you may or may not have a working installation, and you're likely to be at a loss as to how to fix it as well. Basically this notion of Debian is entirely broken. The correct way to do this is to run all the configuration dialogs FIRST, before installing any packages, and then install all the packages if, and only if, all the dialogs have produced verified, coherent configurations. In some cases, a linear install of a large set of packages would be impossible, so a meta-installer would be required to partition the install sets, and then run installation phases on a topological sort of them. This is because some dialogs will contain conditionals based on automatically determined variables which require some other package to be already installed, not just already configured. At present, the invariants are enforced by running the config/install in the required order without phasing .. which is poor for large collections of packages (such as 'all updates') but is untenable for a raw install, because the only way to be sure everything is OK if there is a problem is to reinstall everything (from the CD ..) BTW: I also use another package manager called GODI which is for Ocaml sources. Packages in that work by having two packages: a X package depends on X-config package: the configurator for a package is a separate package. If your config doesn't work right .. you can't install the package that requires it at all, and down the dependency chain. This system is used extensively to manage bindings to libraries written in C, which GODI does not manage. The main fault is that if you upgrade the C library, you may forget to rerun the configurator for that binding .. a problem a whole system packager like Debian shouldn't have. (There is a workaround: you can rebuild everything any time you like). -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>
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