Hi Joey, On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 09:11:50PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > > I really think this is a bug that needs to be dealt with from the debconf > > side of things. Torsten, if you want to add a workaround to slapd, that > > should be ok, but the real bug appears to be that the readline frontend is > > somehow defaulting to an empty string for text values (although, not in my > > testing here...). It may be that slapd is one of the more severely affected > > packages, but I'm sure it's not the only place this causes problems. > > The bug is in slapd for including this text in its debconf template: > > "The default is /var/backups/slapd-VERSION"
How is that a bug? In fact this can be helpful in case you changed the
value and later wonder what is was originally. Apart from that it is an
example how to use the VERSION tag.
> This comes under the heading of not referring to debconf UI in a
> template. Just as you don't know how debconf will choose to present a
> yes/no question and thus "say yes" constructions should be avoided, you
> don't know how or if a given debconf frontend handles default values[1].
So you suggest removing that string and leaving the user completely in
the dark what to enter which is utterly needed especially if the debconf
frontend ignores the default value.
> Indeed a static template such as this one doesn't even know for sure
> what the default value _is_; it could have been overriden.
By whom? As I am the maintainer of slapd I expect nobody else to change
that default.
> The technical details of why debconf is not able to present a default
> value with the readline frontend, when the recommended
> literm-readline-gnu-perl is not installed, or with the teletype
> frontend, are already explained in bug #183970. I know of no better
> solution than what debconf already does, aside from perhaps refusing to
> run the readline frontend without literm-readline-gnu-perl (but this
> wouldn't fix the teletype frontend anyway).
This is a silly discussion. We are saying that debconf ignores the
default value when using a special frontend which is bad. This makes it
especially senseful to add the default value to the template as
otherwise the user is completely in the dark (experienced staff aside).
On this grounds you argue that we should /remove/ that default value
because debconf can't handle it?
If you really think we should not mention the default value there that's
okay but on the other side I request that the behaviour of the readline
frontend is changed to at least present the user the current/default
value if the libterm-readline-gnu-perl package is not installed. And
make it very clear that hitting return means submitting an empty value.
Perhaps it's even better (for compatibility with the readline-installed
case) to ask the user to explicitly input "" for the empty value.
> I'll reassign this back to slapd if it's agreeable.
In case you do - what is the right action of slapd here? I'd rather
avoid running each db_go in a loop which checks the input values.
Greetings
Torsten
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