Bug#206684: debian-policy: Proposal for going ahead with mandatory debconf use for prompting
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> Well, one of the cases where this has come up in the past is with
> programs called /from/ maintainer scripts which need to interact with
> the user and are not implemented using debconf.
> In practice, it is already prohibited for any package that's a
> build-dependency of an arch: any package to require interaction with the
> user at install time (no use of /dev/tty, and no debconf questions of
> critical priority) because such packages need to be installable
> noninteractively on the buildds. For other cases, I'm not sure I have
> an opinion on how the conflict should be resolved.
Well, taking off my Policy delegate hat and putting on my Debian user hat,
I do have a strong preference for requiring non-interactive installs to
work. It's permissable, of course, for anything requiring debconf input
to fail if that input isn't available in the form of pre-seeding, but only
if the input is really required in order to do anything sane, and
pre-seeding should always be supported in that case. But for everything
else, I don't think maintainer scripts should assume a tty is available.
This is because I care a lot about non-interactive upgrades and
installations. I want to be able to control package installation with a
configuration management system (Puppet in my case, but Cfengine would
pose the same issues). We simply run too many Debian systems to be
wasting our time logging on to every system to perform upgrades and
installations, so any package that can't be installed non-interactively is
already buggy and nearly unusable from our perspective.
(Not to mention FAI, which of course has similar issues.)
> Yes, libc6(\.1)* does include such non-debconf prompting code for this
> reason, so I think the exception is needed.
Several packages contain such code (including postfix, IIRC). What I was
never sure about was whether it was actually necessary or not.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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