Bug#353474: tetex-bin: Fails to install

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 09:26:13AM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>> After upgrading tex-common, it should have displayed a text like:
>> 
>>     echo
>>     echo "An essential entry is missing in $file:"
>>     echo "No setting of $variable."
>>     echo "teTeX will not work without it, you need to fix your configuration"
>>     echo "files.  The version of $file that is provided by the package"
>>     echo "should be available as ${file}.dpkg-dist"
>>     echo
>>     echo "Exiting."
>> 
>> Didn't you see that?
>
> Nope.  It is *very* easy for messages like that to scroll by unseen
> during a large dist-upgrade.  Also, policy 3.9.1 mandates pausing for a
> response:
>
>      If a package has a vitally important piece of information to pass to
>      the user (such as "don't run me as I am, you must edit the following
>      configuration files first or you risk your system emitting
>      badly-formatted messages"), it should display this in the `config' or
>      `postinst' script and prompt the user to hit return

Don't you think that

echo "Exiting"
exit 1

is sufficient, even if dpkg tries to configure a couple of other
packages afterwards?  Do we really need to let the user acknowledge at
that place?

Or did it (i.e. the newer version of tex-common) *not* exit with an
error on your system *although* the conffiles were still missing an
important entry?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)