Re: Call for seconds: Policy modifications
On Sun, Sep 13, 1998 at 01:00:35AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> Zed Pobre <zed@moebius.interdestination.com> wrote:
> ...
> > to:
> >
> > If a package has a vitally important piece of information to pass to
> > the user (such as "don't run me as I am, you must edit the following
> > configuration files first or you risk your system emitting
> > badly-formatted messages"), it should display this in the postinst
> > script and prompt the user to hit return to acknowledge the
> > message. Copyright messages do not count as vitally important (they
> > belong in /usr/doc/<package-name>/copyright); neither do instructions
> > on how to use a program (these should be in on line documentation,
> > where all the users can see them).
>
> I think that any information worty of displaying in a package's postinst
> (aside from prompts) should also appear in the package's description.
>
> Any counter examples?
Reading the proposal, I guess it's just a "typo fixing" thing, as it
deals only with changing the path in the manual to reflect current
practice.
But if we are going to talk about the content of the paragraph, I think
we should discourage maintainers from prompting the user in the postinst.
One of our goals is to support unattended installations, isn't it?
There are two things that prevent it: package configuration and
displaying "vitally important" information.
For package configuration we have discussed many times how we would like
to have a "configtool+database". Until that one is implemented, I guess
anything the user must edit to make the package work should be edited in
the postinst, as we want packages that work right after installation.
For the V.I.-info (not vitally important for the package to work), it may
be mailed to the root account or copied to root's home directory, or ...,
and a message added to dpkg "Read your mail ..." or "Read the file
/root/README-foo for important installation information".
(It may make sense to add a flag for attended/unattended installations).
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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