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some ideas methods and techniques for dealing with excessively verbose or inquisitive or garrulous installation and upgrade messages :-) (was Re: New updated "1.2 installation problems" list.)

On Thu, 19 Dec 1996, Dominik Kubla wrote:

> >>>>> Craig Sanders writes:
> [...]
> > why not ask the user in the perl postinst?
> 
> > if the user says yes, then make the link.  otherwise don't.
> 
> Yes this would be a workable solution, but it makes automatic upgrades
> impossible.  

automatic upgrades are already impossible.  Many packages ask questions.
metamail & other packages that add mime types ask many (too many) questions.

I'd like to see an option which told the install-mime script to just
accept the default response without prompting.


> Just print a short notice, that should be good enough.

printed notices are only useful if the user is watching the screen when
they're printed...they usually scroll by too fast to read.

I'd also like to see a few options/environment variables recognised by
dselect:

DSELECT_VERBOSE
    (boolean, default yes). If yes, display all information, including
    the thousands of "skipping deselected package" and "already
    installed" messages. If no, only display important stuff.

DSELECT_LOG
    can be either an email address (e.g. "root") or a fully qualified
    pathname (e.g. "/var/log/dselect.log"). Any value not starting with
    a "/" is treated as an email address.

    Output produced during a dselect upgrade is displayed to screen AND
    saved/mailed to the location specified by DSELECT_LOG.

    When mailed, the subject header should be "dselect log YYMMDD"

DSELECT_ASK_ABOUT_CONFFILES
    (boolean, default=yes). If "no", then assume that all answers to
    questions about upgrading conf-files are "no". Do not ask user.


craig

PS: i'd like the following little script added to the base package.
I find it very useful when looking at machines which have been up
and running for months (as all good debian machines should do :-).
By that time, the dmesg buffer has lost all the boot time info, and
/var/log/messages has been rotated so many times that the info has
vanished.

/etc/rc.boot/0dmesg:

    #! /bin/sh

    echo "Mailing dmesg to root"
    dmesg | mail -s "dmesg `date +%y%m%d`" root


Does anyone else think that this might be useful enough to add to the base
package?

it might be worthwhile renaming it to "0hardware_log" and expanding it
to include the contents of /proc/interrupts and /proc/ioports in the
message it mails to root.

comments?

craig


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