I've been thinking a bit about the need for mass-installations. Having done a few of them, it gets to be a tad tedious ...
Currently, the preinst and postinst scripts ask the user questions, and make changes according to the responses. Instead of that, we need a general service script that processes a package-specific file containing questions and answer-variables. The results of this get appended to an installation response file that each package can source to retrieve the answers it needs. Hrmm, got that ? For example, exim would use a file : exim-user-info which would contain things like : (excuse the poor examples :) ;======================================== <exim-domain-name> What is the domain name of this system ? </exim-domain-name> <exim-smarthost> What is the smarthost (if any) used ? </exim-smarthost> <exim-relay-domains> Which (if any) domains will you allow relaying for ? </exim-relay-domains> ;======================================== and so on. The actual variable definitions can be anything, I just used html-style as an example ... The general service script would parse this, looking for a file named <package>-user-info, and ask the user each of the questions in the file. The responses would go into the installation wide "install-response" file, like this : ;======================================== #!/bin/sh exim-domain=mydomain.org exim-smart-host=smtp.my-isp.com exim-relay-domains="buddydomain.com otherfriend.com" ;======================================== Now during installation, the exim preinst and postinst scripts would source the install-response file, creating the variables with the responses they need. At this point, it's just as if they've asked the questions and retrieved the user responses. If a particular response variable doesn't exist in the install-response file, the script can still prompt just like normal, though this ruins the effect. Where dselect has the list of packages to be installed and is waiting for the user to select "Install", it can run the service script to pre-ask all the config questions. Once that's done, run the normal install and the user can walk away. Even better is combining this with a pre-selected list of packages and a pre-built install-response file. Heh heh, the mechanics of all this is an exercise left to the reader :) -- Dean Carpenter [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
