FAI-softupdate: Modified fai.conf in non-interactive session

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Tue, 3 Nov 2009 15:11:22 +0100, Martin Härtig <mhaertig at mpp.mpg.de> said:

    > Dear Thomas Lange,
    > first of all, thank you for creating FAI, it's a very handy tool for  
    > maintaining some (and counting) of our desktop machines here.
Thanks.

    > Recently, we encountered a problem within the FAI softupdate routine,  
    > which updates the fai-client version to 3.3: Because we modified the  
    > fai.conf-file, softupdate now interactively asks if we want to keep  
    > the current version or replace it with a newer one:

    >> Configuration file `/etc/fai/fai.conf'
    >> ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
    >> ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
    >> What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:
    >> Y or I  : install the package maintainer's version
    >> N or O  : keep your currently-installed version
    >> D     : show the differences between the versions
    >> Z     : background this process to examine the situation
    >> The default action is to keep your current version.
    >> *** fai.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ? Reading package lists...


    > I guess this is a rather frequently asked question, but is it possible  
    > to pass an answer to this question to make softupdate non-interactive  
    > again? It seemed to me that debconf is not capable of this task.
This is not a fault of FAI, it's the normal dpkg behaviour. You can
add --force-<thing> so that dpkg behaves in another way.
This is from dpkg --force-help

  confnew [!]            Always use the new config files, don't prompt
  confold [!]            Always use the old config files, don't prompt
  confdef [!]            Use the default option for new config files if one
                         is available, don't prompt. If no default can be found,
                         you will be prompted unless one of the confold or
                         confnew options is also given

I think we had some discussion about this on the linux-fai mailing list.

P.S: It's better to mail to linux-fai at .... (see my To: header), so more
people can answer your question.

-- 
regards Thomas