What did I just ruin?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2018 15:29:08 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
>On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 08:39:13AM +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> My guess is, that since debconf was "falling back to frontend:
>> Readline", the dialog required to answer with "yes" or "no" and
>> nothing else, so the "assume-yes" option did exactly this, it always
>> assumed "yes", otherwise apt-get would have aborted, see
>> http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man8/apt-get.8.html .  
>
>I'm afraid that your guess is entirely wrong.  apt-get --assume-yes
>doesn't influence debconf in any way.

You are quoting out of context.

>debconf's readline frontend is still perfectly capable of asking
>questions, so no harm will have come of this.  The message about
>downgrading to a different frontend is essentially informational (but
>useful if you were specifically expecting a different frontend).

He? This is exactly my guess! So if you should be right, my guess
should be right, too ;).

>Even in noninteractive mode (which wasn't what happened here

The culprit isn't "DEBIAN_FRONTEND", but it is "TERM", OTOH in this
case they are related to each other.

On Tue, 10 Jul 2018 09:36:35 -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>I had intentionally set TERM=dumb so that any interaction could be
>captured by script(1).

On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 20:37:43 -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>debconf: (Dialog frontend will not work on a dumb terminal, an emacs
>shell buffer, or without a controlling terminal.)

;)