apt-get

[Diego Calleja García]

El Tue, 1 Jun 2004 06:09:29 +0200 Emiel Kollof <coolvibe at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escribió:

> can be bolted on, but it should never be required. When it's 4 am, and you 
> want to automatically upgrade your binaries, the last thing one wants is for 
> the package system to hang on some prompt waiting for input. Unattended 
> operation is a must.

And that's how it has always worked. debconf (which is the real configuration
frontend - everything else has been deprecated AFAIK) has several "priority
levels", low, medium, high and critical. If you configure it to "low",
you'll see all possible questions, configure it to "critical" and very probably
you won't see a single warning for years. This, BTW, allows debian to be a
"user friendly" distro, since you can attach the diferent "priority levels"
to different types of users. The installer would ask the user what kind of
installation he wants, and it would set "high" for novice users, so newbies
aren't bothered with difficult questions, and the not showed questions are given
a default value or evaluated dynamically.

Also, debconf has different "outputs", so you can configure your programs
with a dialog, readline, editor, gnome or KDE "output" (and yes, the last
two means that debconf will show a GUI under X instead of a text-based one)

There's also the "non interactive" output ie: what you really were asking
at the start, a not-attended installation. This "configuration frontend"
is definitively much better than any other "configuration frontend" I've
ever seen on linux/BSD or anything. Different text/GUI outputs. Questions
with different "levels of difficulty" so you can ignore the difficult ones
and let the system to set the default value, or not ask anything at all.
If you can access to some debian machine try "dpkg-reconfigure debconf",
it has all the options.

This makes the package management suitable for all kind of users, since
you can go from non-attended or text-only servers to final users
with a GUI frontend and only easy questions. Whatever package management dfly
uses, I hope the configuration achieves similar (or better) funcionality
to the one provided by debconf.


Diego Calleja