Preservation of system state considered harmful

[Ian Zimmerman]

Sean> it is asked by dpkg and has nothing to do with debconf.

Rick> "man 7 debconf-devel" seems to agree with my recollection that it
Rick> has a lot to do with debconf.  Am I badly misreading, or does
Rick> debconf store and replay "config scripts" for previously-given
Rick> answers to "any questions necessary to configure the package"?

Debconf questions are those asked with a semi-graphical frontend
(dialog, by default, which means curses-based, with blue background).
Mostly this is configured so -=all=- these questions are asked in a
batch before dpkg even unpacks the debs (it's announced by
"Preconfiguring packages...").  The conffile questions, OTOH, are asked
by dpkg itself during the unpacking.  Bird of a different feather, or
something like that.

-- 
I wonder which is the best virus for unix and if I can write
a better one in Microsoft BASIC ?
Hans-Marc Olsen in comp.unix.programmer