[Debconf-devel] Bug#631769: Bug#631769: New Kde frontend based on debconf-kde-helper

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 01:43:09PM -0300, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:
> El jueves, 19 de julio de 2018 07:08:43 -03 Colin Watson escribió:
> > Sorry for dropping this on the floor for so long!  I've reviewed this
> > and tested it on a Debian KDE stretch system, and I see no major
> > problems, so I've rebased and merged it.
> > 
> > The only substantive changes I made were to silence the rather noisy
> > debugging output from debconf-kde-helper (using QT_LOGGING_RULES) unless
> > DEBCONF_DEBUG=kde is set, and to make the Kde frontend fall back to the
> > Qt frontend.
> 
> That sounds good, and a post-patch related change if I'm not mistaken (the 
> logging rules where added after Modestas did the patch, again if I'm not 
> mistaken).

Quite possibly.

> > It seems likely that we'll need to get rid of it relatively soon, but
> > I'd first like to make sure that the new one works properly in more than
> > trivial test situations.  I've CCed the maintainers of debconf-kde and
> > the debian-qt-kde list - is that something you could test, please?  Use
> > debconf 1.5.68 once it hits unstable shortly, and also make sure that
> > you aren't seeing warnings about falling back to the Qt frontend.
> 
> Now the bad news: we haven't (or at very least I haven't) heard of Modestas in 
> a long time now.

Ah, that's a shame, but the debconf side of the new frontend is simple
enough that I should have no trouble maintaining it from here on in
anyway.  (I don't know much about the debconf-kde side, but that's had a
respectable amount of activity lately so I'm not too concerned about
it.)

> For what I've gathered from the last queries I made to the team due to qt4-
> perl and the debconf frontend no one is really using/interested in it. Of 
> course if someone reading me thinks I'm wrong please jump in right now!
> 
> At this point getting rid of the qt4 fromtend will surely help us reduce the 
> Qt4 footprint in the archive.
> 
> 
> What I can do is ask users to try it. I would need to know first how to use 
> it, because I see the KDE fromtend installed in my system but I've never seen 
> a KDE-based debconf dialog. Yes, I might be missing something very silly 
> here...

Simple enough: once you've installed the new version, "dpkg-reconfigure
debconf" and select the "Kde" frontend.  You can then install/remove
packages that do debconf interaction, using apt or aptitude or a
graphical frontend or whatever, and see if you get reasonable prompts.

If you'd prefer to configure the frontend temporarily, then you can also
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=kde in the environment (but make sure that this
makes it all the way through whatever layers of package management
you're using).

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]