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Re: "autoinstall" with debian

'Dan Stromberg wrote:'
>
>I'm noticing that "virtual packages" and "package alternation" (perhaps
>another phrase has already been coined - I mean a dependency like "a | b
>| c") do much the same thing.  Would it be reasonable to drop the
>"package alternation"?  Indeed, there appear to be situations where the
>two are combined, like: "depends: smail | mail-transport-agent".  Is
>this (or should this be) valid?  Also, are recursively defined virtual
>packages legal (and should they be)?

There is one syntactic suger associated with the "alternation" option.
The first item in smail | mail-transport-agent will be "suggested" or
preferred (if a choice is available as in dselect).

>I'm looking for something that will do this sort of thing
>-non-interactively-.  

dselect has support in the code for this sort of thing.  I'd like to
make it more accessible ...

>Is there an existing facility for -not- starting up daemons while
>installing?  Aside from temporarily linking start-stop-daemon to
>/bin/true?

We need policy on this.  I think the first time a daemon is installed,
it should ask in the postinst "Activate sendmail or not [Yn]?".  If
the daemon is already running, it should notice this fact and activate
the daemon otherwise it must ask or remain inactive.

>How does debian keep track of which packages are currently installed? 
>IE, I'm needing to install (under /a) some packages that have
>interactive postconfiguration, and I need to do this all
>noninteractively.  Barring getting a non-interactive postconfig for
>every package (my preference, but not necessarily realistic in
>a shortish time frame) I'd like to just --extract these, configure them
>with a locally-provided script, and "do the magic" to tell debian the
>packages have been configured.  What is "that magic"?

/var/lib/dpkg.  But don't touch any of the files there!  dselect and
dpkg have support for using an alternative directory.  I don't know
how this works with the chroot options.

>This -was- discussed recently, but I'm running up against a related
>issue: some symlinks are absolute, which are giving me headaches when
>trying to, EG, use /a/usr/bin/awk - because that points off to two
>different absolute pathnames.  Could we perhaps reopen the
>absolute/relative symlink discussion with this in mind?  If the links

This may be a misfeature in update-alternatives.  That program hasn't
been maintained in a long time.  You might want to fix it.

-- 
Christopher J. Fearnley            |    Linux/Internet Consulting
cjf@netaxs.com, cjf@onit.net       |    UNIX SIG Leader at PACS
http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf         |    (Philadelphia Area Computer Society)
ftp://ftp.netaxs.com/people/cjf    |    Design Science Revolutionary
"Dare to be Naive" -- Bucky Fuller |    Explorer in Universe

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