[PKG-Openstack-devel] Re-aligning the OpenStack dependency chain across Ubuntu/Debian

[Gaudenz Steinlin]

Hi Thomas and James

It's really great to hear that you are working on improving the
collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu on the OpenStack packages.

Thomas Goirand <zigo at debian.org> writes:

> On 06/05/2015 11:45 AM, James Page wrote:
>
> I'd like to work on the core packages to try to realign them with
> Ubuntu. This can be done in the Liberty branch before Liberty beta 1 is
> released. As you know, the Debconf is a contencious issue. I see 2 ways
> to fix that:
>
> 1/ Add a first screen asking the user "do you wish to have debconf
> handling of your configuration file", which would be set to no by
> default. We can, in the postinst, save this value into
> /etc/openstack/<project-name> (as it's the policy this value must be
> saved somewhere).

I also strongly prefer this option. I already asked for such an option
several times. It would also simplify the live for Debian users who
don't want to configure OpenStack through DebConf (for whatever reason).

Why do you want to save the value somewhere? I don't think that's
necessary unless you plan to only show the question once for all the
OpenStack packages and to use that answer for subsequent package
installations. But then it should be saved in
/etc/openstack-debconf.conf or something similar. If you want to show
the question for all the *-common packages, I think it's fine to just
let debconf save the value for later retrival. As this is only a value
that changes how the postinst scripts run and not does any actual
configuration of the package, the usual "Debconf is not a registry"
saying does not apply here. IMO it's just fine to use the value
stored in the debconf database.  The value of the "seen" flag will make
sure that the question is only shown once.

>
> 2/ Make it so that all of the debconf stuff gets removed on some
> condition when building the package. For example, it could be an
> environment variable, or "dpkg-vendor --derive-from ubuntu", or even
> both (with the environment variable having priority).

If this solution is chosen, I would prefer an implementation with an
environment variable so that it's possible to also opt-out of Debconf on
Debian. Are you thinking of a runtime environment variable during
package installation or during package build?

>
> I don't see any other ways to handle the differences. If you have other
> ideas, let me know.
>
> Then, I would strongly have a preference for solution 1/. If that one
> isn't an option for you, let me know and I will start implementing 2/.

I would also prefer option 1 as this would also benefit Debian users and
not only Ubuntu user if they prefer to not use Debconf. What priority do
you think the question should have? Would it be an option to have the
question at a lower priority for Ubuntu to make it so it's not shown
there and a higher priority on Debian so it's shown by default to Debian
users?

Gaudenz