Control: retitle -1 dpkg: conffile prompts should use debconf Hi!
I was asked by Julian Andres Klode on IRC about the status of this, so let's update the bug too. On Sat, 2007-02-10 at 15:16:30 -0000, peter green wrote: > in situations where a user cannot interact directly with dpkg > (debian-installer is one example of this though conffile prompts > shouldn't normally happen there) conffile prompts currently result > in a hung installation process, this is not a good thing. > > since debconf seems to be the preffered method of communicating with > the user and already has mechanisms in place to allow for situations > like D-I and for completely non-interactive installs it would seem > more sensible to use it. A fresh installation that produces conffile prompts seems like a bug to me, and not something that should be worked around. Also fully non-interactive installations can already be achieved with the desired selection of --force-conf* options. But in any case, for GUIs and similar this is still desirable. There was some work done by Sean Finney some time ago. AFAIR there was also review of those patches on the mailing list but the comments there were never addressed. The patches can be found in <https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git/log/?h=pu/conffile-debconf-prompt>. I don't even remember anything about the state of that branch, but from a quick skim, these are some of the quick problems I see: - diff printing is not handled via debconf. Although that is something I find to be atrocious UI every time I get confronted with configuration file prompts from ucf-using packages. :/ - The debconf usage should be configurable I think. - Shell spawning would need to be handled somehow too, as GUIs might unhappy with dpkg spawning it by itself. - The code does not seem to integrate greatly with debconf, and looks a bit bolted on. - The code does not use the proper dpkg APIs. - The code does not follow the dpkg coding style. I can probably rebase the patches now and fix some of these issues, but some others will require a bit more thought. Thanks, Guillem
