[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#932685: Bug#932685: Samba package won't respect the -y switch of apt-get install command

[Mathieu Parent]

Control; retitle -1 samba-common: DHCP debconf question shouldn't be critical
Control: severity -1 wishlist

Le dim. 21 juil. 2019 à 22:09, Mikael Hartzell
<mikael.hartzell at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> Package: samba-common
> Version: 2:4.9.5+dfsg-5
>
> I maintain a software package (freelcs.sourceforge.net) that runs on Debian. My software needs samba and installs this among other packages it needs with apt-get. The user runs my GUI installer which uses apt-get in the background to install needed Debian packages unattended. This has worked fine before in Debian releases 7, 8 and 9, but now in Debian 10 the installer fails because the samba-common package won't respect the -q=2 -y swithces on apt-get commandline. The exact commandline I use is:
>
> apt-get -q=2 --reinstall -y  install samba

-q is not related to debconf questions.

> another commandline I tried is:
>
> sudo apt-get --reinstall -y --no-install-recommends install samba

Those options neither.

> The expected behavior is that samba package is installed without prompting the user for anything. However both of these commands now always open up a prompt asking:
>
> "If your computer gets IP address information from a DHCP server on the network, the DHCP server may also provide information about WINS servers ("NetBIOS name servers") present on the network.  This requires a change to your smb.conf file so
> that DHCP-provided WINS settings will automatically be read from /var/lib/samba/dhcp.conf.
> The dhcp-client package must be installed to take advantage of this feature.
> Modify smb.conf to use WINS settings from DHCP?"
>
> IMHO this seems like a bug in the samba package, since the behavior has changed from earlier samba - versions and the apt-get switches -q=2 -y and --no-install-recommends should provide default answers for the packages questions and the installation should proceed without any prompts.

This was actually fixed by samba 2:4.8.1+dfsg-1 [1]. And was broken by
the upload of isc-dhcp (4.1.1-P1-7) in 2010.

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/samba-team/samba/commit/04bfc02107845ed941cf7cfd5003a56736d78d54

What you want is something like:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y  install samba

So, the behavior is as expected.

However, I agree that asking for wins options today should not be that
"critical".

I'm keeping this bug to track either:
- the lowering of the option, or
- the complete removal of dhcp/wins support


Regards
-- 
Mathieu Parent