Holger Levsen <hol...@layer-acht.org> writes:
> Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if necessary.
> Prompting must be done by communicating through a program, such
> as debconf, which conforms to the Debian Configuration
> Management Specification, version 2 or higher. Exempted from using
> such a programm are required/essential packages if no such
> interface is available when they are executed.
I think required is too weak; I think we want to say only essential.
However, that does open up the problem of libc6. How about:
Packages that are essential or that are dependencies of essential
packages may fall back on another prompting method if no such
interface is available when they are executed.
I like this approach better; I'd rather require all non-essential packages
to use debconf, including depending on it and failing if it doesn't work
for some reason. It just removes some ambiguity, I think. Falling back
to some other prompting method is just going to change the failure mode
for non-interactive installs, and while essential packages have to deal
with this, other packages really shouldn't.
I may be missing some subtlety, though.
>> The only other thing that I'm not sure about is what to do about
>> preinst scripts. Are we requiring debconf for preinst prompting (and
>> hence requiring a Pre-Depends) for non-essential packages?
> As we require it for any prompting, this includes preinst, and as stuff
> used in preinst needs to be a Pre-Depends, I think this is clear.
Agreed.
> P.S. Andrew, thanks!
Yes, thank you!
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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