- necessary. Prompting may be accomplished by hand<footnote>
- From the Jargon file: by hand 2. By extension,
- writing code which does something in an explicit or
- low-level way for which a presupplied library
- (<em>debconf, in this instance</em>) routine ought
- to have been available.
- </footnote>
- (but this is deprecated), or by communicating through a program
- which conforms to the Debian Configuration management
- specification, version 2 or higher, such as
- <prgn>debconf</prgn><footnote>
- <p>
- 6% of Debian packages [see <url
- id="http://ftp-master.debian.org/~joeyh/debconf-stats/"
- name="Debconf stats">] currently use
- <package>debconf</package> to prompt the user at
- install time, and this number is growing daily. The
- benefits of using debconf are briefly explained at
- <url
- id="http://kitenet.net/doc/debconf-doc/introduction.html"
- name="Debconf introduction">; they include
- preconfiguration, (mostly) noninteractive
- installation, elimination of redundant prompting,
- consistency of user interface, etc.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- With this increasing number of packages using
- <package>debconf</package>, plus the existence of a
- nascent second implementation of the Debian
- configuration management system
- (<package>cdebconf</package>), and the stabilization
- of the protocol these things use, the time has
- finally come to reflect the use of these things in
- policy.
- </p>
- </footnote>.
+ necessary. Prompting should be done by communicating
+ through a program, such as <prgn>debconf</prgn>, which
+ conforms to the Debian Configuration management
+ specification, version 2 or higher. Prompting the user by
+ other means, such as by hand<footnote>
+ From the Jargon file: by hand 2. By extension,
+ writing code which does something in an explicit or
+ low-level way for which a presupplied library
+ (<em>debconf, in this instance</em>) routine ought
+ to have been available.
+ </footnote>, is now deprecated.