Bug#206684: mandatory use of debconf for user prompting a release goal for squeeze

[Andrew McMillan <andrew@morphoss.com>]

On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 20:26 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> >         Management Specification, version 2 or higher, unless no such
> >         interface is available when they are executed.
> >

> 
> Should we require that non-essential packages depend on debconf if they're
> going to do prompting?  That wording implies to me that any package could
> check whether it was already installed (without a dependency) and fall
> back on non-debconf prompting, but I think that should only be permissible
> for essential packages.

It seems to me that to mandate it that tightly is unnecessary.  Surely
it will be simpler for a maintainer who has added support for Debconf to
just depend on it.  Even if the maintainer does provide a workaround for
an inessential package I can't see that it will matter to me: the
important element is that they support the debconf interface, not to
restrict what they might do in addition to that.


> The only other thing that I'm not sure about is what to do about preinst
> scripts.  Are we requiring debconf for preinst prompting (and hence
> requiring a Pre-Depends) for non-essential packages?

If a developer wants to prompt in their preinst (extremely rare, I
believe, and explicitly recommended against in policy) then they
certainly should either (a) pre-depend on debconf, or (b) provide a
work-around solution for the case where debconf is not installed on the
target system.  The decision to pre-depend on debconf would seem like a
no-brainer to the maintainer, I suspect.

Since almost all packages *will* have situations where they are called
when debconf is available they will (according to the wording above) all
be required to use debconf.  The fallback would only be chosen at
execution time.

Effectively I'm proposing that all packages needing user input must
support debconf (or equivalent) - but also to recognise that some of
them might be required to (install|configure|remove|...) with user input
in it's absence and not to restrict them from Doing The Right Thing in
that circumstance.

Cheers,
					Andrew.

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andrew (AT) morphoss (DOT) com                            +64(272)DEBIAN
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