On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 12:13:55PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > > Last I knew, policy said packages *were* allowed to depend on the > > availability of /dev/tty during configuration, even if they're not > > supposed to be doing direct prompting by way of it. This seems to have > > been changed, but isn't mentioned in the policy upgrading-checklist?
> It's still there: > 6.3. Controlling terminal for maintainer scripts > ------------------------------------------------ > The maintainer scripts are guaranteed to run with a controlling > terminal and can interact with the user. Because these scripts may be > executed with standard output redirected into a pipe for logging > purposes, Perl scripts should set unbuffered output by setting `$|=1' > so that the output is printed immediately rather than being buffered. Hah, yes, grepping for 'tty' doesn't match on this. > This seems to me to somewhat contradict section 3.9.1. Well, one of the cases where this has come up in the past is with programs called /from/ maintainer scripts which need to interact with the user and are not implemented using debconf. In practice, it is already prohibited for any package that's a build-dependency of an arch: any package to require interaction with the user at install time (no use of /dev/tty, and no debconf questions of critical priority) because such packages need to be installable noninteractively on the buildds. For other cases, I'm not sure I have an opinion on how the conflict should be resolved. > The unbuffered output bit also seems rather randomly placed here. :) On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 11:41:32AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > > Indeed, there are probably less packages to fix that I thought. > > Christian, would you be interested in pushing a lenny release goal about > > this? > If the release team approves, I would be happy to change the should in > Policy to must. Do we need to make any exceptions for essential packages > like libc6 that may be configured before debconf is available for some > reason? Yes, libc6(\.1)* does include such non-debconf prompting code for this reason, so I think the exception is needed. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
