On Wed, Sep 04, 2019 at 11:36:42AM +0200, Konstantinos Dalamagkidis wrote: > I wanted to configure the use of the noninteractive backend in > debconf.conf on a system currently running oldstable. According to the > documentation, setting: > > Frontend: noninteractive > > should have been sufficient, but this had no visible effect. Only when > I also added "Frontend_forced: true" did my configuration take effect.
I believe that this only makes a difference for dpkg-reconfigure, which normally overrides noninteractive to dialog if the frontend was only set in the config file or the database, as opposed to the command line or the environment. While I didn't write this code, I would be inclined to say that the basis for this is that the command line and the environment can normally be expected to be more "immediate" single-use kinds of configuration sources, while config files and databases are persistent configuration sources that it's more reasonable for dpkg-reconfigure to override temporarily. I think the best fix for this would be to clarify the documentation to indicate that Frontend_forced must also be set if you really want to use noninteractive for everything including dpkg-reconfigure. Would this be OK for you? -- Colin Watson [[email protected]]
