Bug#353474: tetex-bin: Fails to install

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:

> No, because there could be dozens of other packages that dpkg is trying
> to configure, and some of them are verbose or fast.  It's easy for that
> to scroll by, especially if somebody isn't watching the terminal
> intently.

Hm, if configuring fails and you don't see the error messages, isn't it
usual to call dpkg --configure -a to see them again?  Well, probably we
can't assume this.

On the other hand, this would mean that a noninteractive install isn't
possible - you need to go to every machine and hit enter, instead of,
for example, fixing the conffile mess on one of them and distributing
the correct configuration to the others.

I'm not convinced - I thought that prompting in maintainer scripts is
heavily discouraged.  We could use a critical debconf note, however.

>> 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?
>
> Well, tex-common had configured itself successfully, so I guess that it
> may not have noticed that.

Then I don't understand the sequence of events.  You upgraded tetex, you
got a postinst failure, reported the bug, and after that you upgraded
tex-common (to which version?) and didn't get a message and postinst
failure?  Or did you fix the conffiles before upgrading tex-common?

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