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.)

[Brian Mays <bem5r@virginia.edu>]

>>>>> On Tue, 24 Dec 1996, Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> said:

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

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

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

I think that you misunderstood my proposal.  Some developers have
expressed a desire to upgrade a Debian system automatically (or nearly
automatically).  I have merely pointed out what such an automatic
upgrade would require in terms of modifications to the dselect/dpkg
system and to the postinst scripts of many Debian packages.

I never intended that this procedure be used during an installation of
a new Debian system, nor did I intend that it be used by novices.
What we have now is fine for these situations.  However, the expert
user, who knows what he is doing, might want to do a "silent" upgrade,
especially if the upgrade is a small one, thereby skipping all of
those stupid questions that pop up during an average upgrade.

Most packages, even ones that require extensive configuration when
they are first installed, do not ask the user any questions when they
are upgraded.  The most commonly asked question is whether to replace
a configuration file or two.  It would be nice if the user could
optionally tell dpkg to assume the answer to all of these questions is
no.  After the upgrade, he could tell which configuration files need
his attention by either examining the log file produced during the
silent upgrade, or by running "find /etc -name '*.dpkg-dist'".

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

This is a good idea.  Stuff in the base distribution shouldn't depend
on stuff that might not be distributed with the base distribution.

    Craig> On Fri, 20 Dec 1996, Brian Mays wrote:

    Brian> Then he or she could configure the remaining packages,
    Brian> which could not be configured non-interactively, simply
    Brian> with

    Brian> dpkg --configure --pending

    Craig> i find that i have to do this on nearly every dselect
    Craig> upgrade anyway....

I usually encounter the same problems for the same reasons.  That's
why I was not afraid to propose that expert users would not mind doing
more than one configuration run when upgrading.

--
Brian


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