Ticket #479 (closed enhancement: fixed)

Opened 15 years ago

Last modified 12 years ago

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive is Wrong

Reported by: geofft Owned by:
Priority: low Milestone: Current Semester
Component: -- Keywords:
Cc: Fixed in version:
Upstream bug:

Description (last modified by geofft) (diff)

When running the installer, you should get prompted about things that aren't set by Debathena config packages, especially when installing something as large as thirdparty or extra-software. We should make our install shell script instead preseed the "seen" flag for all the packages that we configure.

Change History

comment:1 Changed 15 years ago by ghudson

I assume you are talking about debathena-auto-update.

This script does not run in an environment where there is a "you" to prompt. Either it's a private machine where the owner has abdicated update responsibility (by selecting -workstation), or it's a cluster machine. If it is not appropriate for a machine to make blind decisions about updates, then it should not be running this script.

comment:2 Changed 15 years ago by geofft

  • Description modified (diff)

I'm actually referring to install-debathena.sh. Sorry about the confusion; I agree it should be set for auto-update.

comment:3 Changed 12 years ago by jdreed

  • Milestone changed from The Distant Future to Quantum Quetzalcoatl

comment:4 Changed 12 years ago by jdreed

  • Status changed from new to committed

Committed in r25748. I'm not 100% sure this is right, because some of these end up with ridiculous values by default. For example, let's say someone later uninstalls afs-config, they'll end up with a ThisCell? of mit.edu (or whatever their domain was at install time, which is Wrong), and a cachesize of 50MB, which not Wrong, but probably still useless. Not sure what the right answer is.

comment:5 Changed 12 years ago by jdreed

Note that cluster still sets noninteractive, because that is in fact what we want for cluster.

comment:6 Changed 12 years ago by jdreed

Feedback on this would be nice. We need to push out a new installer soon anyway.

comment:7 Changed 12 years ago by jdreed

Yeah, so, you can't set 'seen' flags on questions that aren't there. We'll need to set initial values for the questions, then mark them as seen. The question is, should we set empty strings, or copy the initial values from the packages (what if they change?) or what.

comment:8 Changed 12 years ago by jdreed

  • Status changed from committed to closed
  • Resolution set to fixed

Fixed. PXE installs are unchanged (See #702) In truly interactive (that is, on top of a working system) installs, I now get debconf prompts for things like hddtemp.

I chose to configure cyrus-common ahead of time, because a) we pull it in; b) the debconf prompt is scary if you don't know what it means.

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