About a week or so, I announced on debian-devel a project to write a program that asks the user about changed conffiles. It was described in the first message in the thread "Less interactive upgrades".
Well, I've finished the basic tool, and it seems to be working. I still need to do more testing, as well as write a few frontends for it[1], but I think the time is ripe to consider how best to integrate with dpkg. Since dpkg is a fundamental part of the system, I think that a principle of minimal changes applies. So, I suggest that the best way of doing this would be to give dpkg the ability to exec a program that can handle resolving the question of whether or not a conffile should be replaced. As a first concept, dpkg could use a command line option to determine the program to use, and use the exit value of that program to make the decision, using the existing prompt if the program execution fails or the return value is unknown or something else bad happens. I don't think me just blazing in and coding this is the right way to handle things, but I do think that adding this functionality would make an improvement in the user experience of Debian. So I'd like to know what everyone thinks. Should I implement it, should someone more experienced with the dpkg codebase implement it, or is there a better way of handling this? (I don't think that coding support for my specific solution into dpkg is the right way to handle this... but it's still an option.) deb-cfmgr, as I'm calling the program now, will be released under the GPL once I finish the curses interface, testing, copyrighting, and documenting the program. (Figure sometime next week.) [1] I'm considering using debconf, but I'm not quite sure how well that would deal with questions that change on every invocation. It currently uses it's own method for user interaction, with a console and soon a curses version. -- Tom Rothamel --------- http://onegeek.org/~tom/ ------- Using GNU/Linux Writing from home, just outside Northport, NY. The Moon is Waning Gibbous (67% of Full).
