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Selection-time configuration, delayed configuration, &c

Bruce (and others) have been posting about this, with the assumption
that it will happen.

I think that there is a technical problem with this that needs to be
considered.  There may be good solution(s), but I think we should hear
them first.

If we are to do selection-time configuration then the database of
questions to be asked needs to be loaded before the packages are
actually unpacked.  This database will be quite large (some packages
could be expected to have tens of K of config questions, help text,
&c).  Even our Packages file is now 600K uncompressed.

I don't see how this data can easily be made available to the
configuration program.

Several people have complained about the way that dselect, when doing
a large upgrade, stops many services for quite a while while the
things are upgraded.  This seems to be the main motivation for the
selection-time configuration.

I think that this issue can be solved more easily, by simply having
dpkg/dselect reconfigure things as soon as this can be done.  With a
bit of care for installation order in dselect's scripts this should
result in a minimum of interruptions to service.

The price to pay for this is that all the configuration questions are
not bunched up until the end of the installation.  I suggest,
therefore, that the configure-immediately behaviour be optional.

Note that nothing I've said argues against database-based
configurations schemes, which are a Good Thing.

Ian.


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