The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Rethinking UPMs package format

> - Allow a separate "configuration" script in addition to the regular
>   scripts which should do all interaction with the user and which will
>   be executed at configuration time.

It might be worth taking a leaf out of the SVR4 package system.

They run the interactive configuration scripts for _all_ packages to be installed before doing anything else, and save a per-package response file containing the users responses (in the form of shell variable assignments in the case of SVR4).

Doing this gives the following advantages:

- pre-install scripts can act upon the user's preferences without interaction.

- The user can supply a saved set of response files, instead of answering all
  the questions again.

- The saved responses can be used to modify the behavior of the remove scripts

- The user can get all the configuration interaction out of the way, go and
  make a coffee and come back to an installed system.

- Sensible defaults can be supplied by telling the configuration script to
  run in default or advanced mode, where default tends not to ask the user
  questions if it can help it.

- The policy can be easily enforced, since non-configuration scripts can be
  run with their stdio redirected, so that no interaction is possible.

The down side is that this means that we need to have extracted the configuration scripts early, which I presume will cause problems for people who are downloading packages on the fly with ftp.  I suppose we could make a combined configuration script in similar way to the Packages file, or have unbundled copies of the configuration scripts --- I can't say I like either of these, but hopefully someone can come up with a more elegant solution.

For Debian I would guess that the configuration script should manipulate the configuration database (when we get one), rather than saving shell variable assignments.

Cheers, Phil.



--
Please respect the confidentiality of material on the debian-private list.
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-private-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com