Bug#224509: is it the future yet? (was: Correct spurious promise regarding TTY availability)
It has been over three years since this proposal was submitted
originally, and two over two years since the discussion appears to have
ended.
Our users perceive this part of policy as de facto bugs and experience
problems that might otherwise be avoided; see
#282147 and #298425 for example.
Time changes things that were good decisions in the past. Is it time
for policy to start catching up with DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive?
Isn't debconf the future? It just seems silly to force users to write
expect scripts or other silly hacks to work around bugs that could be
avoided by fixing this policy wart.
Can this proposal be reconsidered, with s/should/recommends/ ? i.e.
+ <p>
+ Availability of a controlling terminal is not guaranteed,
+ so before making use of it it is recommended to check for
+ its availability. If it is unavailable, it is recommended
+ that this is handled gracefully by assuming noninteractive
+ behaviour. Determining the availability of a controlling
+ terminal can for example be done by inspecting the return
+ code of the command <prgn>tty</prgn>.
+ </p>
--
ivan@debian.org
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