Bug#671726: apt: should be able to provide hook information through a named pipe

[Daniel Hartwig <mandyke@gmail.com>]

On 16 March 2013 23:04, Serafeim Zanikolas <sez@debian.org> wrote:
> 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.

Actually, I was refering to the standard frontend just not seeking
input when it is not connected to an interactive terminal.  This would
be, for example, displaying the list of bugs and proceeding, or some
other configurable action depending on the severity, etc..  This is
the same as maintainer scripts behave: with sensible defaults in the
non-interactive case.

Anyway, I recall I already discussed all this on the original bug
report that made its way to aptitude.