On 19/09/2010 04:39, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Andrew McMillan <and...@morphoss.com> writes:
>
>> In general I think providing an "opt out" option which does nothing and
>> successfully configures the package is not harmful. While automation i
>> nice, our own imagination can be limited in understanding the full range
>> of possibilities and we should be careful not to over-guess what the
>> user is trying to achieve by choosing such an option.
>
> This is a very good point. This came up in a different context with
> OpenLDAP recently, and I ended up arguing that same point there. There
> are situations where one really wants to just put the files on disk and
> tell apt everything is okay and deal with the setup later.
>
> I do think it's okay to require that one answer a debconf prompt saying
> "no, I really don't want any configuration" in order to get that opt-out
> behavior, though, so I'm not sure that quite addresses Holger's problem.
>
>>> It's definitely worth talking about if the draft database policy says
>>> something else, as it appears to. My rationale is that the package
>>> setup may simply require a database; some packages don't have a
>>> meaningful stand-alone installation with no database support. I think
>>> it makes more sense to fail the configure step than it does to require
>>> that the user run dpkg --reconfigure later to re-run the package setup.
>
>> Heh. Shouldn't that be "dpkg-reconfigure" :-)
>
> Whoops, yes.
If I recall correctly one on my recent problem, dpkg-reconfigure cannot be
invoked for a package that failed to configure. So, if a question about
leaving file in place without doing any configuration is asked, the package
should provide a way to (re)answer to this question when it detects the
configuration failed (ie dpkg-reconfigure would not fit here).
Regards,
Vincent
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