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

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Andrew McMillan <andrew@morphoss.com> writes:

> The current relevant text is:
>
>         Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if necessary.
>         Prompting should be done by communicating through a program,
>         such as debconf, which conforms to the Debian Configuration
>         Management Specification, version 2 or higher. Prompting the
>         user by other means, such as by hand[9], is now deprecated.
>
> I think we should change that fairly simply to something like:
>
>         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, unless no such
>         interface is available when they are executed.
>
> This:
>
> (a) changes the 'should' to a 'must';
> (b) gives an out for those situations where debconf is not installed;
> (c) narrowly focuses that 'out' only to apply during execution
> (d) seems to me to be a simpler and more elegant approach than other
> wording proposals against this bug.

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.

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?

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