[Pkg-openldap-devel] Bug#596100: Bug#596100: When told not to initially configure slapd, (un-)installation fails due to init script return code.

[Russ Allbery]

Steve Langasek <vorlon at debian.org> writes:

> If you don't want to have to deal with the apt fallout from overriding
> slapd's default initial directory configuration, then /don't do that/.
> I am not at all sympathetic to users who insist on configuring packages
> the hard way and then complain that it's too hard.  I'm not saying this
> is applicable in your case; there are obvious reasons to use a tool like
> chef for configuration management.  But I do from time to time get bug
> reports like this on various packages from people not using
> configuration management tools, who expect maintainers to put in the
> effort to make the package as easy to use without automatic
> configuration as it is with automatic configuration, and that's just not
> realistic.  I don't want my packages to lie to the package manager and
> claim that they're in a configured state when they are not, even though
> this would obviously be convenient when using apt-get.

I haven't followed this entire discussion in great detail, and I know that
we've managed to deal with this for our local packages, but I did want to
mention that it would be nice to have some facility for installing
packages with complex and site-specific configuration requirements like
OpenLDAP in an unconfigured state without dpkg thinking they're
unconfigured.  I agree with Steve that this is far from ideal and really
constitutes a bug in the combination of the various configuration
management systems and apt which makes it difficult to deal with
unconfigured packages, but that bug exists and is both significant and
very hard to fix.  If you have unconfigured packages installed, for
instance, it's quite difficult to get apt to do anything other than
attempt to configure them, which makes life very difficult for the
configuration management software.

In the absence of good Debian-specific support for manipulating package
states in these ways, it's really nice to have some way of saying "just
put all the files on disk, tell apt everything is fine, and let me deal
with the configuration."  This can, of course, be a low-priority debconf
question or even one only accessible via pre-seeding, as long as there's
some way to opt out of the package's normal configuration logic.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't need this, but I think building the ideal
world is fairly difficult here and I don't see it happening soon.

I'll go ahead and clone this bug and mark the cloned bug wishlist so that
we have a place for further discussion.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>