[Please cc replies to this message to me, since I'm not subscribed to deity or dpkg-maint. Thanks.]
I've been talking to various people about the Debian installation process recently, and regularly met demand for an _unattended_ installation process. I'd be willing to participate in designing and implementing such an installation process. What I'm thinking about is essentially a separation between the package configuration step (i.e., moving a package from unpapackagecked to installed state) and any user interaction. From installation experience, there are three kinds of user interaction we get: - Configuration-related questions. They are asked all over the place. With most packages, the user has to answer a few questions which are independent of each other. In this case, all you need is some kind of definition file and a generic question asker. If configuration questions are interdependent (does this ever happen?), a short script should be used. User interaction should be abstracted, so a line-based, curses, or even X11 interface can be used with the same script. Information gathered this way should be stored in some kind of database. Normally, a small tree of files (one file per package, somewhere in /etc) should be sufficient. But once again, these files shouldn't be accessed directly from postinst scripts. Instead, a generic interface to access this database should be defined, so answers could be fetched from other sources. (For instance, sites with a centralized setup process could chose to distribute configuration information over an ldap server.) - Questions about what to do with configuration files when upgrading. This is a package manager problem. In this case, user interaction should be centralized in the end of the configuration process. - General messages, like "you may need to reboot the system later, please press enter". These messages should be collected in a log file which should be presented to the user in one piece in the _end_ of the installation and configuration process. Do you think implementing this with Debian would be possible, from the management point of view? (Note that the proposed model would imply changes to the policy.)
