Bug#365613: [pkg-wpa-devel] Bug#365613: Upgrading remote system makes it unmaintainable after reboot

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 02:42:51PM +0100, Michael Tweedale wrote:
> On  2 May 2006 at 22:05, Kel Modderman wrote:
> > >place, so that custom scripts will stind find it. However I think this
> > >is a quite seldom cornercase, and I highly doubt this would satisfy the
> > >submitter.
> > 
> > Well, lets wait and see if this would indeed satisfy Felix' bug report, 
> > from Felix himself.
> 
> I think *definitely* you should leave this file in place; it's crazy to
> assume noone will have their own scripts that call wpa_supplicant.
> 
> As far the general issue, I don't think the situation is quite as
> serious as Felix suggests, because it is trivial for the user to
> discover what's happened and fix it by reading the documentation. On the
> other hand, having a package upgrade silently break one's network
> configuration without warning is *far* from ideal, in my opinion. A
> message calling attention to this during the upgrade, with a reference
> to the docs and/or the wiki, would be very helpful.

I've looked up what the developers reference says to upgrade notices
[1]. This issue indeed 'may directly affect the package usability' on
upgrades. So it may be warranted to display a debconf notice in this
case. Now the next question is about the priority, so lets see what
debconf-devel(7) says:

> note   Rather than being a question per se, this datatype indicates a
>  note that can be displayed to the user. It should be used only  for
>  important  notes  that the user really should see, since debconf will
>  go to great pains to make sure the user sees it; halting the install
>  for them to press a key, and even mailing the note to them in some
>  cases. It?s best to  use these only for warning about very serious
>  problems.

Ok, so 'note' could be again correct for mentioning this issue to the
user. So if we do this (again, on upgrades only, not on fresh installs),
then the last question would be if this note would be 'low' or 'medium'.
Let me quote debconf-devel(7) again:

> low    Very trivial items that have defaults that will work in the
>        vast majority of cases; only control freaks see these.
> medium Normal items that have reasonable defaults.
> high   Items that don?t have a reasonable default.
> critical Items that will probably break the system without
>        user intervention.

Since this issue won't break the system, but 'only' the wireless network
connection (which is grave enough in some cases), I really don't think
that 'critical' is appropriate. But thats certainly subject to personal
opinion. 

I still think that this is kind of debconf abuse, but I don't find
enough evidence to ground this. IMO, the user gets notified by
apt-listchanges, because we stated this very clear in Debian.NEWS. So
interested administrators would perhaps get this note twice, which seems
to annoying to me. Moreover, I think Debian.NEWS is the correct place.

Perhaps a more experienced maintainer can help here?

Gruesse,
	Reinhard

 
[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-best-pkging-practices.en.html#s6.5.1