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

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> writes:

>          Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if necessary.
>          Prompting must be done by communicating through a program, such
>          as debconf, which conforms to the Debian Configuration
>          Management Specification, version 2 or higher. Exempted from using   
>          such a programm are required/essential packages if no such
>          interface is available when they are executed.

I think required is too weak; I think we want to say only essential.
However, that does open up the problem of libc6.  How about:

    Packages that are essential or that are dependencies of essential
    packages may fall back on another prompting method if no such
    interface is available when they are executed.

I like this approach better; I'd rather require all non-essential packages
to use debconf, including depending on it and failing if it doesn't work
for some reason.  It just removes some ambiguity, I think.  Falling back
to some other prompting method is just going to change the failure mode
for non-interactive installs, and while essential packages have to deal
with this, other packages really shouldn't.

I may be missing some subtlety, though.

>> 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?

> As we require it for any prompting, this includes preinst, and as stuff
> used in preinst needs to be a Pre-Depends, I think this is clear.

Agreed.

> P.S. Andrew, thanks! 

Yes, thank you!

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>