Bug#184507: 2.3.9.1 grammar
On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Chris Waters wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 05:12:12PM -0600, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Chris Waters wrote:
> > > On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 02:06:05PM -0600, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> > My intelligence tells me that if "by hand" is not replaced then
> > technically I can file "serious" bugs against packages that do not
> > use "hand" or debconf.
>
> Oh, please. You're saying that the only *possible* interpretation of
> "by hand" is "by running a program named hand?" That's silly.
> (Especially since there is no such program.)
>
An exaggeration to get attention.
> Anyway, how about this as a replacement:
>
> --- policy.sgml~ 2003-03-13 02:02:23.000000000 -0800
> +++ policy.sgml 2003-03-13 02:01:43.000000000 -0800
> @@ -1083,11 +1083,13 @@
> <heading>Prompting in maintainer scripts</heading>
> <p>
> Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if
> - necessary. Prompting may be accomplished by hand, or by
> - communicating with a program, such as
> - <prgn>debconf</prgn>, which conforms to the Debian
> - Configuration management specification, version 2 or
> - higher. These are included in the
> + necessary. Prompting may be accomplished by writing to
> + standard output and reading from standard input, but
> + this technique is deprecated. Otherwise, prompting must
> + be accomplished by using a program - such as
> + <prgn>debconf</prgn> - which conforms to the Debian
> + Configuration Management Specification, version 2 or
> + higher. These are included in the
> <file>debconf_specification</file> files in the
> <package>debian-policy</package> package.
> You may also find this file on the FTP site
>
It looks good. Later when cdebconf becomes more mature it should probably
be mentioned here, but we should probably ignore it for now.
My only question being, what about packages that don't directly use
standard IO, but call an intermediate program? Does this program have to
correspond to the Debian Configuration Management Specification? I haven't
read the specification so I don't know if it would make sense to draw a
conclusion one way or the other. This question of whether an intermediate
program needs to correspond to the Debian Configuration Management
Specification is the grammar ambiguity that I was mentioning before. Your
change states that any method other than direct IO must conform to to this
specification.
I tried searching for the "Debian Configuration Management Specification"
and found
http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/debconf_specification.html
which I assume is the document? If so, intermediates such as ncurses,
slang (I'm not sure if it could be an intermediate) do not seem to conform
to it and would not be allowable. I think this is a desirable meaning, but
I'm unsure as to how many serious bugs this may cause. It would be
interesting to find out how many packages use direct IO and methods other
than debconf if there are any that still don't use debconf.
Also if I did find the correct document, then it'd be nice to change the
word "Specification" to "Protocol" and/or put in a link to the document.
Drew Daniels
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