Subject: Where does debconf database content come from?

From: Yuri Kanivetsky <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 12:18:11 +0300

Hi,

For all I know, debconf database is supposed to store "answers" to
configuration parameters of packages. But when you install operating
system, you aren't given an opportunity to specify them. Not all of
them at least. There are a bunch of them in
/var/cache/debconf/config.dat.

So where do all of them come from? Does debian comes with default
config.dat? Does it contain values for all the packages? For some
predefined set of them? Which package owns it? Or generates?

I've run into it trying to set up lxc container. There where
differences between releases. So I started to dig into where they're
coming from. The issue was with resolvconf package and
resolvconf/link-tail-to-original parameter.

Regards,
Yuri

---

From: Sven Joachim <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 03 Sep 2016 12:03:45 +0200

On 2016-09-03 12:18 +0300, Yuri Kanivetsky wrote:

> them at least.

That's because most of the questions have sensible default answers, and
by default you only see those which really need to be answered
(i.e. their priority is high or critical).

> predefined set of them? Which package owns it? Or generates?

They are all shipped in individual packages, see the
/var/lib/dpkg/info/*.templates files.  The maintainer scripts take care
of installing them into the debconf database.

If you want to know more about debconf, install the debconf-doc package
and read debconf(7) and debconf-devel(7).

Cheers,
       Sven