Bug#342077: exim4-config: Please consider prompting for config type at high priority

[Joey Hess]

Marc Haber wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 06:23:47PM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > The rationale is: there is a sane default anyway (Local delivery only)
> > so skipping the question during critical priority installs will not
> > hurt and will save one question in critical priority installs.
> 
> otoh, the vast majority of exim users is too stupid or too lazy to
> read the docs. We already have like three people per day asking how to
> get rid of the "no mail to remote domains" error message. This is
> going to get much worse, if we require people to type something as
> cryptic as "dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config", which is mentioned in the
> docs, to get a working e-mail system.
> 
> That being said, I am not too convinced that this change will be right.

Asking the question at high priority instead of the current critical
will not affect the vast majority of installations, since they occur at
high priority. It will allow experienced users to skip this question if
they force the installer to run at critical priority, which is a
technique that is mostly only used by people doing preseeded automated
installs (who tend to know what they're doing).

It's fine to just go by the definitions of the two priorities in debconf.conf
when making this decision:

              high   Items that don’t have a reasonable default.

              critical
                     Items  that  will  probably break the system without user
                     intervention.

If taking the default answer to the question can lead to something
that could be described as "breaking the system", then critical priority
is the right choise, otherwise high priority would be better.

BTW, I would be very pleased if we could come up with some way to avoid
the question for even high priority installs, but I haven't been able to
think of a way to do that that wouldn't confuse many users.

-- 
see shy jo
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