On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 03:08:50PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > also sprach Holger Levsen <hol...@layer-acht.org> [2009.10.28.1121 +0100]: > > On Dienstag, 27. Oktober 2009, martin f krafft wrote: > > > Since debconf-get-selections is not the appropriate way to create > > > preseed.cfg files, > > > > why not? because you think it's hackish, suboptimal or..? > > So says the documentation.
The main problem here is that the preseed.cfg is supposed to be a minimal specification of the admin's intent, whereas the output of debconf-get-selections is a splodge of things from which that intent might be partially discernible, mixed in with things that would be irrelevant or dangerous to specify when preseeding. If we were to add some hints to the question templates to indicate how relevant a question is to preseeding, along with perhaps a udeb for asking the intent questions that are vital to an auto-install, but will never get asked in a manual install, then we might be able to generate a preseed.cfg that would be at least a useful starting point. When generating the preseed.cfg, if we did that by iterating over the udebs that provided the questions, we could allow individual udebs to provide a preseed.cfg generator script that would override the default output generator, so that things like partman could spit out something that included specialised settings, and a chunk of comments about what you need to make it usable. As a very simplistic start, we could have a flag indicating that the question was preseed-irrelevant, and make the resulting preseed.cfg look much like debconf-get-selections, but with the irrelevant questions commented out, and a chunk of the standard default preseed.cfg stuck on the top. I'd also like to see the output stage accepting hooks with which I could override the output generation stage with something that would split the preseed.cfg up in a way that would be suited to dropping it into my hands-off scheme. Perhaps off topic, but related, it would be great if we had a way of detecting that a preseed.cfg was using old question names that had been superseded -- so that when a question changed in a backwards incompatible way, rather than things just going weird, one would get an error suggesting that the preseed.cfg needs updating, and the install would bail out. Cheers, Phil. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
