tags 492626 pending thanks On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 11:08:49AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Julian Andres Klode <j...@debian.org> writes: > > On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 08:27:05PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > >> Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes: > >>> This is somewhat intentional since I hadn't yet seen a case of this > >>> where doing that makes sense, other than when using some debconf > >>> frameworks that Lintian recognizes. Could you point me at an example? > > >> We didn't get a reply to the above question, so I'm going to go ahead > >> and close this bug with the reasoning in the paragraph above. If you > >> do have examples where Lintian gets this wrong, please feel free to > >> re-open. > > > For example, readahead-list just uses the debconf questions for > > preseeding, has no config script and does not need translated > > descriptions (as we do not display them). > > Okay, thanks. I'll reopen. > > This is exactly the case where this doesn't make sense to me, though. Why > would you support pre-seeding and not prompting? That to me seems > contrary to the point of debconf and makes configuring the package > unnecessarily obscure. > > If you asked the question with a priority of low, only those users who > want to see all options would see it. It seems like if it's important > enough to make controllable via preseeding, it's important enough to ask a > low-priority question about. > > But maybe I'm missing something?
There are quite a few cases in the installer where this is exactly what we want; we use debconf as a database and not every question we put there corresponds to something we want to ask the user. Indeed, some of these questions come before we are in a position to ask questions at all: usb-discover is the example I have to hand just now, which runs before the menu starts but can still retrieve preseeded answers from the database. It seems to me that putting "for internal use" in the description constitutes an override, and while we might not agree in every case the purpose of that string is to override Lintian. Besides, it's already supported in checks/debconf as something where we don't check for description best practices, and so it doesn't seem to make sense to check for translations either. I've gone ahead and committed a fix for this. If it's still controversial after the explanation above, let's talk about it further; perhaps a compromise would be to make it udeb-only, although I don't see cause for that at the moment. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
