[Debconf-devel] Bug#939379: debconf: Specifying frontend in debconf.conf not effective

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2019 at 11:36:42AM +0200, Konstantinos Dalamagkidis wrote:
>    I wanted to configure the use of the noninteractive backend in
>    debconf.conf on a system currently running oldstable. According to the
>    documentation, setting:
> 
>    Frontend: noninteractive
> 
>    should have been sufficient, but this had no visible effect. Only when
>    I also added "Frontend_forced: true" did my configuration take effect.

I believe that this only makes a difference for dpkg-reconfigure, which
normally overrides noninteractive to dialog if the frontend was only set
in the config file or the database, as opposed to the command line or
the environment.

While I didn't write this code, I would be inclined to say that the
basis for this is that the command line and the environment can normally
be expected to be more "immediate" single-use kinds of configuration
sources, while config files and databases are persistent configuration
sources that it's more reasonable for dpkg-reconfigure to override
temporarily.

I think the best fix for this would be to clarify the documentation to
indicate that Frontend_forced must also be set if you really want to use
noninteractive for everything including dpkg-reconfigure.  Would this be
OK for you?

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]