Mandate use of debconf or equivalent for user prompting. See #206684.

diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index df586d16a80b487f15d79e286c770b807121f304..8f02c12cbf4d6e734838dfa45f1d7a5910fe0b70 100644 (file)
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -1218,17 +1218,16 @@
          <heading>Prompting in maintainer scripts</heading>
          <p>
            Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if
-           necessary. Prompting should be done by communicating
+           necessary. Prompting must 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.
+           Specification, version 2 or higher.
+         </p>
+
+         <p>
+           Packages which are essential, or which are dependencies of
+           essential packages, may fall back on another prompting method
+           if no such interface is available when they are executed.
          </p>
 
          <p>