Debian turns ten [LWN.net]

Debian turns ten

Posted Aug 16, 2003 21:49 UTC (Sat) by erich (subscriber, #7127)
In reply to: Debian turns ten by tjc
Parent article: Debian turns ten

You can a) select the amount of questions you will be asked b) a lot of questions can be answered at the beginning of the installation (that is what the pre-configure scripts are for)
But before you have downloaded the packages these questions are not known; so it's (mostly, there are some package where this doesn't work yet) downloading, configuring, installing.

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Debian turns ten

Posted Aug 16, 2003 22:16 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

But it doesn't need to be this way.

All the dependancies are in the Pacakges file. Why not put the questions
there as well? I doubt it would double the size, and it would mean

a) all the questions can be asked at the very beginning
b) questions get to be well structured and not ad-hoc.

I guess the "what do you want to do about this config file that you
seem to have changed" question would have to be dealt with differently,
but I suspect that could be delayed until afterwards.
"BTW, you had some config files that both you and the maintainer changed.
We have left yours in-place for now, but you might like to run
dpkg-resolve-config-differences
to sort out any issues"

Debian turns ten

Posted Aug 17, 2003 1:53 UTC (Sun) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

a) all the questions can be asked at the very beginning
b) questions get to be well structured and not ad-hoc.

c) answers to questions can be stored in a temp file so that if the installation aborts for some reason the user doesn't have to answer them all over again.

Debian turns ten

Posted Aug 18, 2003 23:15 UTC (Mon) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

I guess the "what do you want to do about this config file that you seem to have changed" question would have to be dealt with differently, but I suspect that could be delayed until afterwards.

Well, as to that, I think an upcoming dpkg feature in the "this took way too long for someone to think of and implement" category will be 3-way merging of config changes. Not hard to do with diff and patch, maybe they'll even use the 'wiggle' tool by, what's-his-name, I forget the author now... (:

... but either way it should eliminate most of the above questions. At least on my installations - usually I changed a config file in some trivial way that would be easy to merge.