Bug#671726: apt: should be able to provide hook information through a named pipe
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 10:32:40PM +0800, Daniel Hartwig wrote:
> Right. Apt-listbugs is effectively called in the same context as
> maintainer scripts, and those are not guaranteed to have an
> interactive shell. The program must be smart enough to detect this
> and do the right thing (I'm not sure if it already does :-).
By default, apt-listbugs relies on /dev/tty, but that can be overriden via the
APT_LISTBUGS_FRONTEND env variable. The only valid frontend alternative at the
moment is "none", which makes apt-listbugs a noop (to avoid hanging when
invoked non-interactively). The idea would be to add a "programmatic" or so
frontend, which would rely on some form of IPC instead of the terminal.
> This is all regardless of the aptitude–su–login issue that prompted
> this bug report IIRC.
Indeed. In fact, I'm not sure any more that using a fifo instead of stdin is
needed for a "programmatic" frontend. After all, the tracebacks in #662983
suggest that the failure occurs only when apt-listbugs tries to access
/dev/tty, at which point it has already parsed the apt hook data from stdin.
Francesco, am I missing something?
--
Every great idea is worthless without someone to do the work. --Neil Williams
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