Ola, I followed the story of this bug because Thomas reflects in his bug report an opinion that is shared among many people, including, as far as I know, Joey Hess when he wrote the debconf protocol and the debconf package (which is why I CC Joey to this mail).
When it comes at notes like the one you're using in harden, I can cite
the debconf-devel(7) man page:
note Rather than being a question per se, this datatype
indicates a note that can be displayed to the user. It
should be used only for important notes that the user
really should see, since debconf will go to great pains
to make sure the user sees it; halting the install for
them to press a key, and even mailing the note to them in
some cases. It’s best to use these only for warning
about very serious problems.
As you see, depending on the way one sees things, one can't probably
tell that this really fits the note used in harden.
On the other hand, I must admit that, as you use a low priority to
display the note, it is not *that* annoying and that calling it an
"abuse" may be a little strong...:-)
I think that the main intent hidden behind us (mostly
translators....because we are the people who usually read all the
debconf notes, as we have to translate them) chasing these "abuses" is
to discourage too much people/maintainers to use them.
This is a kind of chicken and egg problem: if notes are really used
only for very serious warnings, then a little number of people will be
tempted to use them.
If they are used all the time, to warn admins about this and that or
to display stuff that really pertains to README.Debian or NEWS.Debian,
this is kind of an incitation to use them everywhere.
We won't probably insist much more about this topic as the point is
certainly not having you do changes to your package without being
convinced they are worth it. The main point is probably bringing
another point of view on that topic....and, anyway, this is probably
not the most important topic to deal with in Debian...:-)
The initial bug report may have sounded a bit "aggressive" to your
eyes....which is not really surprising. Thomas, or myself (or some
other people from time to time), send a lot of such bug reports and
often lack time to adapt the bug report text to each and every case.
Hope this will help you getting the whole picture and, anyway, thanks
in the name of all of us for the work you're doing to maintain your package(s).
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