Subject: Re: debconf, readline-frontend and critical notes: How to really stop?

From: Branden Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 17:05:43 -0500

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 02:19:13PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Frank Küster wrote:
> > as the last thing in debian/config. Is this a bug in the manpage, or
> > rather an error by me?
> 
> It's a bug in debconf (#101800) with no particularly good solution.
> Please don't try to work around it.

IMO the frontend should pause, doing the latter in your description.

  Or this might be a short run, which will return the user to the prompt soon
  (or immediatly).  Pausing then is quite annoying, when you see:

    blab blah blah blah
    [More]
    prompt#

I think this is only really annoying if the "blah blah blah" message wasn't
really that important in the first place, in which case it shouldn't be a
debconf note anyway, and the user's annoyance should be expressed to the
corresponding package maintainer with a bug report.

Alternatively, couldn't you have the readline frontend produce a prompt at
the end of any displayed note, such as:

Press Enter to acknowledge this message.

?

That would render more explicit the idea that we're not pausing because we
think the screen has filled, but because we want the user to indicate that
he/she has seen the important message we have given him/her.

Please let me know if I am not understanding the issues here.

(I do realize that my suggestion does not steer in the direction of
keystroke minimization, which is a laudable goal of yours -- but I would
think people seeking to minimize keystrokes should be using the
noninteractive frontend, not readline.)

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |
Debian GNU/Linux                   |         Ab abusu ad usum non valet
[email-masked]                 |         consequentia.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |