[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#973343: metaphlan2-data: Can not be installed non-interactively

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Charles,

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 04:05:03PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> 
> I tried to create a container with the whole set of packages
> recommended by med-bio, but it failed because metaphlan2-data can not
> be installed non-interactively.
> 
> > Setting up metaphlan2-data (2.6.0+ds-4) ...
> > debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Dialog
> > debconf: (No usable dialog-like program is installed, so the dialog based frontend cannot be used. at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Dialog.pm line 76.)
> > debconf: falling back to frontend: Readline
> > Configuring metaphlan2-data
> > ---------------------------
> > 
> > This binary Debian package is using a different dataformat than it is used by 
> > the package metaphlan2.  To use the data with metaphlan2 a conversion is needed.
> >  The conversion script takes about 20min. If you decide to delay this conversion
> > you need to manually call
> > 
> >    /usr/sbin/metaphlan2-data-convert
> > 
> > 
> > after the installation process has finished.  Otherwise metaphlan2 is not 
> > usable.
> > 
> > Should the database be created right now? [yes/no] 
> 
> I think that it would be great to fix that in Stable.

I do not think that we can fix this in stable.  Its definitely no RC bug
if a package is not installable non-interactively.

> Maybe by
> just removing the dependency of med-bio to metahplan2-data there ?

The metapackage does not depend metahplan2-data but metahplan2 and this
definitely depends metaphlan2-data.  This data package containes really
large files that need to be processed in huge files and the interactive
question is whether this shoul happen now or later.  That question seems
to make sense since the conversion process took about 20min on a
computer that was "recent" two years ago.  So the question is whether
we should

    a) make metahplan2 only suggests in med-bio
    b) drop that interactive question

BTW, for cluster installs its recommended to use med-cloud which
assembles non-gui packages which is probably what you want.
 
Kind regards

     Andreas.

PS: The med-cloud task definitely needs *active* maintenance.  We have
    a lot new packages but these are not added to med-cloud yet.

-- 
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