Bug#206684: debian-policy: Proposal for going ahead with mandatory debconf use for prompting
On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 12:13:55PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Last I knew, policy said packages *were* allowed to depend on the
> > availability of /dev/tty during configuration, even if they're not
> > supposed to be doing direct prompting by way of it. This seems to have
> > been changed, but isn't mentioned in the policy upgrading-checklist?
> It's still there:
> 6.3. Controlling terminal for maintainer scripts
> ------------------------------------------------
> The maintainer scripts are guaranteed to run with a controlling
> terminal and can interact with the user. Because these scripts may be
> executed with standard output redirected into a pipe for logging
> purposes, Perl scripts should set unbuffered output by setting `$|=1'
> so that the output is printed immediately rather than being buffered.
Hah, yes, grepping for 'tty' doesn't match on this.
> This seems to me to somewhat contradict section 3.9.1.
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.
> The unbuffered output bit also seems rather randomly placed here.
:)
On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 11:41:32AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Indeed, there are probably less packages to fix that I thought.
> > Christian, would you be interested in pushing a lenny release goal about
> > this?
> If the release team approves, I would be happy to change the should in
> Policy to must. Do we need to make any exceptions for essential packages
> like libc6 that may be configured before debconf is available for some
> reason?
Yes, libc6(\.1)* does include such non-debconf prompting code for this
reason, so I think the exception is needed.
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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