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MeeGo: open development and upstream involvementMeeGo: open development and upstream involvementPosted Apr 22, 2010 22:46 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)In reply to: MeeGo: open development and upstream involvement by Tet Parent article: MeeGo: open development and upstream involvement
> ..supposed lack of post-install scripts..
Slight misunderstanding I think. The .deb camp complains against the prohibition of post install scripts that are interactive in rpm, i.e. debconf. But without that iron rule automated updating isn't practical so it is hard to argue for the Debian Way on this one. Packages should be able to install without asking questions and they darned sure should be able to update without them. And since new dependencies tend to spring up in updated packages any update has the potential to install a previously uninstalled package.
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MeeGo: open development and upstream involvement Posted Apr 22, 2010 23:26 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
It's *really* nice to have the ability to prompt users.
And you can do noninteractive installs of deb packages, too, you just have to pass the proper "noninteractive" arguments to it. It's in fact quite practical.
MeeGo: open development and upstream involvement Posted Apr 23, 2010 0:30 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I totally disagree. I remember my Debian days... I would launch an apt-get update, head out for coffee, and come back to find an interactive prompt asking some totally inane question. Answer the dialog, watch the disk grind for a few minutes, come back 30 minutes later and another dialog is insulting everyone's intelligence. Repeat all afternoon. It's horrible.
No idea why Debian packagers want to chat so much. It's a bad idea to change the priority level to reduce the chattiness because now you're on a rarely-used code path -- you're going to find problems that not many other people encounter. Tried it. It's not worth the time.
I love that with Ubuntu I'm only occasionally asked about grub conffiles, and with Fedora I'm never bugged at all. I tell the computer to update, go away for 1/2 hour, and it's updated! Every time. Don't underestimate how wonderful this is.
Just my perspective. How nice that there are alternatives to make everyone happy.
MeeGo: open development and upstream involvement Posted Apr 23, 2010 1:47 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Perhaps your debian days were before debconf was made ubiquitous in Sarge in 2005? For the last few releases, it asks all the questions all up front. (*) And...Debian and Ubuntu use the same system...
(*): ...except for asking what to do about replacing files in you've modified that the package maintainer has also modified...it still asks those one-by-one in the middle of the install. I agree this is a pain in the ass. But you can also disable that, and do like Fedora does and tell it to always replace your configuration files (keeping a backup).
Furthermore, dropping the priority is *not* a terrible idea that never works: all it does is choose the default options.
MeeGo: open development and upstream involvement Posted Apr 23, 2010 4:21 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
In Fedora, the conf files are not always replaced. It's a bit more complex than that. Refer to
MeeGo: open development and upstream involvement Posted Apr 23, 2010 18:33 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Yeah, it was probably around then. The problem was that some packagers chose defaults that no sane person would use. Nobody except me complained because nobody except me actually changed the priority.
IIUC, Ubuntu made an effort to cut the number of questions asked by their core packages to zero because it's more user friendly. Not sure if this was actually tracked anywhere but it did seem like Hoary asked fewer stupid questions than Woody.
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