Ticket #702 (review enhancement)
installer should use debconf
| Reported by: | geofft | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | normal | Milestone: | Current Semester |
| Component: | installer | Keywords: | |
| Cc: | Fixed in version: | ||
| Upstream bug: |
Description
So, we have this thing that asks you for some questions and then installs some Debian packages. Sounds familiar...
If we use Debconf to ask questions for the installer, and use debconf-apt-progress to wrap our aptitude calls, then we get a couple of nifty things:
- The normal text-mode install is capable of giving a little nicer menus with back/forward options and such.
- We get a graphical installer for free, just by switching to the GNOME or KDE frontends, with a progress bar for apt.
- It will integrate with the PXE install UI (i.e., debian-installer) instead of being a shell script run in a separate window.
Perhaps part of the latter is getting the preinstall PXE stuff to also use Debconf, so that we can prompt for stuff before the base install completes.
Note that, if we actually want a Debconf frontend other than "noninteractive" running during the initial install, we'll need to deal with #479 and preseed "seen" flags appropriately instead of abusing the noninteractive frontend into doing that for us.
Change History
comment:2 Changed 12 years ago by jdreed
- Milestone changed from The Distant Future to Quantum Quetzalcoatl
comment:3 Changed 11 years ago by jdreed
When we do this, we should remove the conditional in the installer (added in r25883) that still makes PXE installs non-interactive.
comment:4 Changed 10 years ago by jdreed
- Status changed from new to review
Here's a rewrite using Debconf of the stage1 installer: https://github.com/mit-athena/scripts/pull/12
At the moment, it just mirrors existing functionality, and passes nothing to stage2.
This is testable by booting from PXE and holding down Shift to get a PXELINUX boot prompt, and booting "stage1-test"
I'll note there's comments from amb in the stage2 that say:
# Using debconf here will hang, so parse the command line manually.
We run stage2 as an include_command, not an early_command, and that's possibly relevant. Now that the mass upgrade is done, we could maybe switch to early_command for stage2, since we pass the netcfg options manually now and in theory you should never get to stage2 without valid networking (statically from the passed parameters, or DHCP from being registered).