[ Sorry, resending, missed to actually Cc Colin! I don't currently have my head where it should be. :/ ]
On Sun, 2022-04-10 at 10:52:56 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote: > Hi! > > On Sun, 2022-04-03 at 22:29:42 -0400, Cameron Katri wrote: > > I am helping write a GUI APT frontend and we wanted to add proper > > conffile > > support, preferably be providing our own GUI alert with the possible > > actions. I had realized that the best way to do that would be to add an > > option to DPKG that allows a custom program to be specified to be used > > instead of the default prompt when replacing conffiles. In src/configure.c, > > the function deferred_configure_conffiles() calls promptconfaction(). > > promptconfaction() runs the function show_prompt() and parses the result. My > > patch will modify promptconfaction() to execute an external program and > > parse the result of that instead of the show_prompt() function. However > > before I started writing anything I wanted to know if this is something that > > could be upstreamed, and if you have any ways to improve this idea. > > The long-time plan has been to add debconf(7) support to dpkg. There's > a very early draft (probably missing structure and much detail) at > <https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/DebconfIntegration>, but > AFAIR there are several things that would need changes first from the > debconf side to be able to integrate this properly, which has seemed > like a non-trivial endeavor. I think we have had some brief discussions > about it in the past (might have been face to face) with Colin Watson > (CCed, current maintainer) and Joey Hess (a previous maintainer), but > I'm afraid we never got to do much with it, or write a concrete plan > about it. > > There was a PoC by Sean Finney, adding debconf support long time ago, > but that did not cover much of the above. This can be found at: > > > <https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git/log/?h=ext/sean-debconf-prompt> > > I'm wondering though, whether you might be able to use dpkg's > --status-fd (which can be specified multiple times, even if apt passes > its own), where you'd get the prompt stuff via a structured output > that you could parse instead? This would have the advantage of being > readily usable right away. > > Thanks, > Guillem
