[packagekit] Status of the APT backend

[Josselin Mouette]

Le vendredi 22 février 2008 à 08:54 +0100, Michael Vogt a écrit :
> That is probably a good opportunity to think about a way to integrate
> the dpkg conffile-has-changed message into some debconf like mechanism

Definitely. Could some code from ucf be adapted to do the job?

> (or we just set --force-confnew).

I do hope not. That means any trivial change from the maintainer
(including a comment) is going to break any system on which the file has
been modified. Until we have a clean way to ask it through debconf, the
default should be --force-confold.

> I know that I make myself unpopluar, but for debian/ubuntu there is
> still the open issue of terminal support (in addition to debconf).

Experience shows this is useful, if only to have a quick access to the
upgrade log in case something has gone wrong. Of course it should be
hidden by default.

> The problem here is that the debian policy says [1]
> ----------------------------8<---------------------------------
> 6.3 Controlling terminal for maintainer scripts
> 
> The maintainer scripts are guaranteed to run with a controlling
> terminal and can interact with the user. 
> [..]
> ----------------------------8<---------------------------------
> 
> Fortunately it also says:
> ----------------------------8<---------------------------------
> 3.9.1 Prompting in maintainer scripts
> 
> Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if necessary. Prompting
> should be done by communicating through a program, such as debconf,
> which conforms to the Debian Configuration management specification,
> version 2 or higher. Prompting the user by other means, such as by
> hand[8], is now deprecated. 
> ----------------------------8<---------------------------------

As soon as there is a solution to the conffile check, I think we should
ask for removal of 6.3 - at least for the “interact with the user” part.

> But at least currently we have a bunch of packages that do not use
> debconf and still prompt. Even central packages like libc6 do that
> under certain circumstances. I think for a updater application that
> works with all debian packages in the archive we should have something
> that allows to pass a pty around and attach it to a vte terminal (if
> needed). Don't get me wrong, I don't like this at all, its just that
> reality for debian/ubuntu is that the terminal is still used.

I’d prefer that we set as a release goal to remove any non-debconf
prompt in maintainer scripts. It would be more useful to fix the broken
packages than to work around them. (BTW I don’t see what libc6 is asking
without debconf, are you sure of that one?)

-- 
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