Acknowledgement sent
to Konstantinos Dalamagkidis <[email protected]>:
New Bug report received and forwarded. Copy sent to Debconf Developers <[email protected]>.
(Wed, 04 Sep 2019 09:39:09 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Package: debconf
Version: 1.5.61
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
I wanted to configure the use of the noninteractive backend in
debconf.conf on a system currently running oldstable. According to the
documentation, setting:
Frontend: noninteractive
should have been sufficient, but this had no visible effect. Only when
I also added "Frontend_forced: true" did my configuration take effect.
This is not related to #738956.
Best regards
Konstantinos
Acknowledgement sent
to Colin Watson <[email protected]>:
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debconf Developers <[email protected]>.
(Wed, 04 Sep 2019 11:03:07 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Subject: Re: Bug#939379: debconf: Specifying frontend in debconf.conf not
effective
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2019 11:36:54 +0100
On Wed, Sep 04, 2019 at 11:36:42AM +0200, Konstantinos Dalamagkidis wrote:
> I wanted to configure the use of the noninteractive backend in
> debconf.conf on a system currently running oldstable. According to the
> documentation, setting:
>
> Frontend: noninteractive
>
> should have been sufficient, but this had no visible effect. Only when
> I also added "Frontend_forced: true" did my configuration take effect.
I believe that this only makes a difference for dpkg-reconfigure, which
normally overrides noninteractive to dialog if the frontend was only set
in the config file or the database, as opposed to the command line or
the environment.
While I didn't write this code, I would be inclined to say that the
basis for this is that the command line and the environment can normally
be expected to be more "immediate" single-use kinds of configuration
sources, while config files and databases are persistent configuration
sources that it's more reasonable for dpkg-reconfigure to override
temporarily.
I think the best fix for this would be to clarify the documentation to
indicate that Frontend_forced must also be set if you really want to use
noninteractive for everything including dpkg-reconfigure. Would this be
OK for you?
--
Colin Watson [[email protected]]
Subject: Re: Bug#939379: debconf: Specifying frontend in debconf.conf not
effective
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2019 14:03:32 +0200 (CEST)
> On September 4, 2019 at 12:36 PM Colin Watson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 04, 2019 at 11:36:42AM +0200, Konstantinos Dalamagkidis wrote:
> > I wanted to configure the use of the noninteractive backend in
> > debconf.conf on a system currently running oldstable. According to the
> > documentation, setting:
> >
> > Frontend: noninteractive
> >
> > should have been sufficient, but this had no visible effect. Only when
> > I also added "Frontend_forced: true" did my configuration take effect.
>
> I believe that this only makes a difference for dpkg-reconfigure, which
> normally overrides noninteractive to dialog if the frontend was only set
> in the config file or the database, as opposed to the command line or
> the environment.
>
> While I didn't write this code, I would be inclined to say that the
> basis for this is that the command line and the environment can normally
> be expected to be more "immediate" single-use kinds of configuration
> sources, while config files and databases are persistent configuration
> sources that it's more reasonable for dpkg-reconfigure to override
> temporarily.
>
> I think the best fix for this would be to clarify the documentation to
> indicate that Frontend_forced must also be set if you really want to use
> noninteractive for everything including dpkg-reconfigure. Would this be
> OK for you?
Hi Colin,
indeed the problem was with dpkg-reconfigure and yes a note in the
documentation is more than sufficient.
Since you will be touching the documentation, you could also highlight
that those options need to be in the first stanza (see #738956). At
first glance, one might think that they belong to the database entries.
Thank you
Konstantinos
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