I was digging into this issue for some time now and I think that I can get it to work (at least in the pre-seed before installation case).
As a test, I just pre-seeded my package cacti successfully (full pre-seed at the bottom) by adding cacti cacti/mysql/admin-pass password here_my_admin_passwd_for_mysql to the pre-seed file. dbconfig-common than just does the right thing. However, if I don't want the database to be configured, but still I want the proper config file, i.e. cacti/dbconfig-install=false, dbconfig-common does not use the pre-seeded values for the configuration file unless I specify cacti/internal/skip-preseed=true and disable line 347 of /usr/share/dbconfig-common/dpkg/common. > * accept a new debconf flag (let's call it > "dbconfig-common/debconf_is_a_registry"). I believe that this flag already exist per package. It is <package>/internal/skip-preseed=true. This skip-preseed works because of line 233 in /usr/share/dbconfig-common/dpkg/common which needs to store the dbc_install value, which is otherwise overwritten with the hardcoded dbc_install=true on line 202. Of course that skip-preseed variable was meant as an internal of dbconfig-common, but I would say that this bug shows that there is great need for pre-seeding of packages managed by dbconfig-common. So my proposal would be to remove line 347 in dpkg/common and document the rest of this behavior. I still have to check if/how dpkg-reconfigure works in this respect and will follow up later on that. Paul Full working pre-seed for cacti at default priority: cacti cacti/db/app-user string cacti cacti cacti/db/dbname string cacti cacti cacti/dbconfig-install boolean true cacti cacti/mysql/admin-pass password here_root_passwd cacti cacti/mysql/admin-user string root cacti cacti/mysql/app-pass password blablabla cacti cacti/webserver select apache2 Full working (with line 347 disabled) pre-seed for cacti if I don't want to configure the database: cacti cacti/db/app-user string cacti cacti cacti/db/dbname string cacti cacti cacti/dbconfig-install boolean false cacti cacti/internal/skip-preseed boolean true cacti cacti/mysql/app-pass password blablabla cacti cacti/webserver select apache2
Description: Preseeding fails to parse when dbc should not handle database
If the user sets <package>/dbconfig-install to false the other parameters
are not processed. By removing on early return check, these parameters do
get parsed.
Author: Paul Gevers <elb...@debian.org>
diff --git a/dpkg/common b/dpkg/common
index 1d8e31e..5da32af 100644
--- a/dpkg/common
+++ b/dpkg/common
@@ -343,9 +343,6 @@ dbc_read_package_debconf(){
db_get $dbc_package/dbconfig-upgrade && dbc_upgrade="$RET"
db_get $dbc_package/dbconfig-remove && dbc_remove="$RET"
- # if they don't want help, then we're done and return early
- if [ "$dbc_install" != "true" ]; then return 0; fi
-
# otherwise, just to make sure dbtype is set...
_dbc_sanity_check dbtype || dbc_install_error
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