Re: Another job for the QA team

[Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com>]

I think that the "hit enter to continue" items in the postinst (along
with a lot of silly config options) point at a real need which we're
not addressing properly.

I think one right way of addressing that need requires dpkg (or
at least postinst) support: build an installation message log.
Should probably have the following fields:

package name
package version
urgency
date/time of install
message

urgency distinguishes between messages where not acting on the message
leaves some important aspect of the package disabled and messages which
are "merely informative".

This folds in with the non-interactive install work which is already
fairly well defined (and perhaps partially implemented?) [Presumably
one could write an "interactive front end" for this log which could
give the current "hit enter to continue behavior" or another front end
which put these messages into a separate X widget, or emailed them 
to some address, or made them available for later sysadmin browsing,
or ...

I'm not posting this message to -policy because I don't have time to
research the status of that (non-interactive install) project.  However,
it's probably appropriate for the -qa team to think about migration
strategy: to keep down the number of existing annoyance bugs, and to
keep things in hand once a better system is ready.

[And, since this issue affects most people's perception of debian's
quality I think this -qa list is at least moderately ok for this kind
of message.  Let me know if I'm way off base.]

Thanks,

-- 
Raul