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Re: 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 Fri, 20 Dec 1996, Brian Mays wrote:

> Perhaps what is needed is a way to tell the postinst script to
> configure the packages non-interactively, using whatever defaults seem
> reasonable (possibly telling the user what these defaults are), and
> not pausing after displaying important notices.  If a package's
> configuration procedure absolutely requires input from the user, then
> its postinst script should fail when told to configure
> non-interactively, thereby leaving the package installed but
> unconfigured.

sendmail is an interesting example. It asks many questions, and many
packages depend on it (or mail-transport-agent). they will also fail to
be configured when sendmail fails installation.

dselect currently aborts the installation at the end of the current section
(stable/unstable, non-free, contrib, local) if any packages failed to
install.  This requires the user to fix the problem and then run Install
again.  

Fair enough, that's pretty easy to do once you know your way around
debian - the problem is that most novices wont figure out what they need
to do without any help. Even worse, they'll get confused & disillusioned
and mistakenly think that debian is too broken to use or that it's too
hard for a dummy like them.


btw, i noticed this with the mail-pgp package recently. mail-pgp depends
on pgp, but pgp isn't installed until AFTER mail-pgp because it is in
the non-us tree. this causes mail-pgp configuration to fail and prevents
further dselect Installation until either mail-pgp is deselected or
pgp-{i,us} is installed by hand with dpkg.

Maybe debian packaging policy should be changed to require that packages
which depend on non-us packages belong in non-us...just like packages
which depend on non-free or contrib belong in non-free or contrib.


> With this approach, the user could launch an upgrade/install with
> the non-interactive option set, go do something else, and come
> back to review the contents of the log file. Then he or she could
> configure the remaining packages, which could not be configured
> non-interactively, simply with
>
>     dpkg --configure --pending

i find that i have to do this on nearly every dselect upgrade anyway. My
usual sequense is something like:

    Update Select Install (some minor failure prevents full
    installation)

    Configure Install (usually works fine now. sometimes i have to
    repeat these two steps. Sometimes i have to quit dselect, install or
    remove something with dpkg and then return to dselect)

    Quit


This is usually caused by:

    - faulty/over-zealous dependancy information.

    - depended-upon package not being installed yet (e.g. mail-pgp needs
    pgp)

    - packages missing from my mirror because they haven't arrived yet.

    - packages missing because they don't exist yet (e.g. qt-doc existed
    and depended on qt1 for well over a month before qt1 finally
    appeared! hence my annoyance with documentation packages which
    unneccessarily depend on the packages they document)


> Our goal should be to make the computer work for the user, not vice
> versa. Any thoughts?

yes, this makes perfect sense to me :-)


craig


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