Bug#595652: db packages failing to install...
Andrew McMillan <andrew@morphoss.com> writes:
> In general I think providing an "opt out" option which does nothing and
> successfully configures the package is not harmful. While automation i
> nice, our own imagination can be limited in understanding the full range
> of possibilities and we should be careful not to over-guess what the
> user is trying to achieve by choosing such an option.
This is a very good point. This came up in a different context with
OpenLDAP recently, and I ended up arguing that same point there. There
are situations where one really wants to just put the files on disk and
tell apt everything is okay and deal with the setup later.
I do think it's okay to require that one answer a debconf prompt saying
"no, I really don't want any configuration" in order to get that opt-out
behavior, though, so I'm not sure that quite addresses Holger's problem.
>> It's definitely worth talking about if the draft database policy says
>> something else, as it appears to. My rationale is that the package
>> setup may simply require a database; some packages don't have a
>> meaningful stand-alone installation with no database support. I think
>> it makes more sense to fail the configure step than it does to require
>> that the user run dpkg --reconfigure later to re-run the package setup.
> Heh. Shouldn't that be "dpkg-reconfigure" :-)
Whoops, yes.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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