It feels a bit counter-productive when we in the Skolelinux project spend lots of time trying to convince Debian package maintainers to add support for package configuration using pre-seeding of debconf answers, and then experience that the next maintainer of the same package consider this a waste and throw out the code.
As I believe this is an issuse for all custom debian distributions (CDD), I bring it up here. (More on CDD on <URL:http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?CustomDebian>). The issue provoking this email is the new ntp packages, removing the code we got added to be able to install the package with correct configuration. But I suspect there is a broader issue here. I experence that some debian developers do not even understand the point of making the package automatically configurable at install time using debconf pre-seeding. In Debian Edu, we believe debconf pre-seeding is the only sensible way to do this in a way that all CDDs can benefit, and the only way that is expected to avoid most upgrade problems. The alternative is to replace or edit other packages files, and this is error prone and hard to do within the current policy. I know Non-profit debian have similar needs, and I suspect most custom debians need to do this as well. What should we do to make sure all the packages we need to configure at install time are configurable in a standardized way, preferably using debconf preseeding?
