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

[Michael Tweedale]

On  2 May 2006 at 17:19, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> > 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. 

It seems to me that the "reasonable default" would be to leave the
current setup working... as this isn't an available option, "high" seems
most appropriate to me, but I'm not qualified to pontificate.

> 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.

Well, if warning people that their network connection is likely to be
broken by an upgrade constitutes "abuse" of debconf, then I'd like to
hear about a situation in which it would ever be appropriate to use it.
I think that people (guess: many users of wireless networks have laptops
and aren't administrating a box with large numbers of users) who don't
use apt-listchanges should still receive warnings if part of their
system might get broken.

Best,
Michael