This is a simple walkthrough of Debconf, go through each and every step carefully, soon you will be using it without any trouble.
Best of Luck!
Debconf is a backend database, with a frontend that talks to it and presents an interface to the user. There can be many different types of frontends, from plain text to a web frontend. The frontend also talks to a special config script in the control section of a debian package, and it can talk to postinst scripts and other scripts as well, all using a special protocol. These scripts tell the frontend what values they need from the database, and the frontend asks the user questions to get those values if they aren't set.
Confused yet? Let's go through the three files: config, templates,
and script.
To use Debconf in your project, you need these two files:
debian/config <--- Set eXecutable bit!
debian/templates
The config dictates the order in which to pose questions, which are
defined in templates. This latter file can also be translated, see
the official documentation for this.
Those two files only handle the input to the debconf db. Usually you
want to use that information in the postinst script.
debian/postinst <--- In our example we provide `script`
This file is called after your package has been installed to the file
system. It is here you create or modify any *.conf file with info
from the debconf db. If you need to do some system configuration or
preparation before the package has been installed, use preinst, but
that also requires some more digging in the official documentation.
You also need to tell dpkg-buildpackage to include the config and
your templates. This requires modifying two files:
debian/control <--- Add 'debconf (>= 0.2.17)' to Depends:
debian/rules <--- Add 'dh_installdebconf' to binary-*: rules
The templates file contains all the notes, different questions you
want to ask the user, be it boolean(true/false), multiple answer, string
inputs, displaying notes, everything you want to display or ask the
user.
P.S. make sure you leave a space in the begining of the Long Description, check the file in case you have any doubt.
Next, decide what order the questions should be asked and the messages to the user should be displayed from the template file we talked about earlier.
Config script does all this, it has no other job than to display notes and questions from template file and take input from the user in the form of answers to the question it asked.
The job of this script is to use the input stored in debconf database. It all depends how you want to use the inputs, I jave just printed the inputs stored.
Do not modify these files directly!
/var/cache/debconf/config.dat
/var/cache/debconf/templates.dat
config.dat stores all the template questions and their replies, notes
if the user has 'seen' the questions already, to avoid asking again and
again.
templates.dat stores all templates.
Use the following magic commands to work remove templates or unset the 'seen' flag:
echo PURGE | sudo debconf-communicate <packagename>
echo UNREGISTER package/setting | sudo debconf-communicate
echo FSET package/setting seen false | sudo debconf-communicate
To see the value of settings:
echo GET package/setting | sudo debconf-communicate
- Change the permssion of the scripts to executable
- run the first script
sudo ./config.You need to use sudo in order to make changes to the debconf database - run the second script
sudo ./script
That's all, best of luck again and enjoy your experience!