Re: Section 6.3 should reference 3.10.1 (was: It is 23:53, do you know whether your package (un)installs cleanly?)

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>]

On Sun, 04 Sep 2005, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote:
> Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> writes:
> >         * Some packages still don't use debconf for prompting, and
> >           instead do silly stuff that assumed it is OK to read and
> >           write /dev/tty.
> 
> Actually, the policy explicitly allows this:
> 
> | The maintainer scripts are guaranteed to run with a controlling terminal
> | and can interact with the user. If they need to prompt for passwords, do
> | full-screen interaction or something similar you should do these things
> | to and from /dev/tty, [...]
> [Debian Policy 3.6.2.1, section 6.3]
> 
> 
> This should probably changed a bit to reference 3.10.1, which says that
> all means to prompt the user besides debconf are deprecated.
> 
> I'm not yet sure that this my view is right, so I only CCed -policy (and
> have not filed a bug yet).

Your view is right. 

Any sort of user input interaction outside of debconf [for maintainer
scripts] is deprecated.  

Any sort of importat output user interaction [i.e. alerts to the user]
outside of debconf warnings is deprectated, AND an extremely dumb idea to do
otherwise anyway, since it is likely that anything short of a debconf
warning will never be noticed anyway.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh