Steve Langasek <vor...@debian.org> writes: > If you don't want to have to deal with the apt fallout from overriding > slapd's default initial directory configuration, then /don't do that/. > I am not at all sympathetic to users who insist on configuring packages > the hard way and then complain that it's too hard. I'm not saying this > is applicable in your case; there are obvious reasons to use a tool like > chef for configuration management. But I do from time to time get bug > reports like this on various packages from people not using > configuration management tools, who expect maintainers to put in the > effort to make the package as easy to use without automatic > configuration as it is with automatic configuration, and that's just not > realistic. I don't want my packages to lie to the package manager and > claim that they're in a configured state when they are not, even though > this would obviously be convenient when using apt-get.
I haven't followed this entire discussion in great detail, and I know that we've managed to deal with this for our local packages, but I did want to mention that it would be nice to have some facility for installing packages with complex and site-specific configuration requirements like OpenLDAP in an unconfigured state without dpkg thinking they're unconfigured. I agree with Steve that this is far from ideal and really constitutes a bug in the combination of the various configuration management systems and apt which makes it difficult to deal with unconfigured packages, but that bug exists and is both significant and very hard to fix. If you have unconfigured packages installed, for instance, it's quite difficult to get apt to do anything other than attempt to configure them, which makes life very difficult for the configuration management software. In the absence of good Debian-specific support for manipulating package states in these ways, it's really nice to have some way of saying "just put all the files on disk, tell apt everything is fine, and let me deal with the configuration." This can, of course, be a low-priority debconf question or even one only accessible via pre-seeding, as long as there's some way to opt out of the package's normal configuration logic. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need this, but I think building the ideal world is fairly difficult here and I don't see it happening soon. I'll go ahead and clone this bug and mark the cloned bug wishlist so that we have a place for further discussion. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
