Bug#950493: steam:i386: Fails to install when using debconf priority critical

[Stephen Kitt]

On Sun, 02 Feb 2020 15:11:02 +0000, Witold Baryluk <witold.baryluk at gmail.com>
wrote:
> It DID NOT ask me anything about license at all.
> 
> Why do I need to accept steam license anyway explicitly anyway. I am
> requesting installation, so it is quite obvious.

It’s not obvious: there are license terms which don’t match what you’d expect
when installing a package in Debian. *You* might know that installing Steam
involves accepting a specific license, but the package maintainers can’t
expect that of all users.

> My debconf priority is 'critical'. But this totally looks like a question
> that needs to be asked, so it should be critical.

The priorities are defined as follows in debconf-devel(7):

high
    Items that don't have a reasonable default.
critical
    Items that will probably break the system without user intervention.

This isn’t something that would break the system, it’s a question for which
there is no reasonable default, so it’s priority “high”, not “critical”.

> If I change my debconf priority to high, and then retry, it asks me to
> agree and finishes successfully.

And I think that’s the more sensible approach. If you set your default
debconf priority to “critical”, you need to expect breakage of this sort,
given the priority definitions...

Regards,

Stephen
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