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I'm currently creating a custom live-image installer. Anyways, I'm taking a look at all other packages in the binary stage and many (if not all) are using debconf to show progress bars and take inputs, etc.

My problem is none of the debconf manuals states about commands like db_progress nor are there any helpful information in /usr/share/debconf/confmodule.

Not even a google search with quotes ["debconf" "db_progress"] would lead me to any valid information.

Where do I find them?

tinnick
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1 Answers1

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The debconf commands are supposed to be described in man debconf-devel (look at it on your system, the online version is poorly-formatted), but db_progress isn’t mentioned there.

As far as I can tell, the only description of progress-bar handling is in Debconf::ConfModule. You can see it in use in the demo sample.

Stephen Kitt
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  • Thank you for the demo sample. I wonder what the Debian developers response to this? Are people just suppose to "know" these things? Is it just me being a terrible dev? – tinnick Jun 26 '20 at 01:56
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    My answer was written with my Debian Developer hat on ;-). Searching [in the Debian source code](https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=\bdb_progress\b&literal=0) suggests that `db_progress` is mostly used in the installer, and I suspect people working on the installer are familiar with it (or find out about it from reading the code of other installation modules). This isn’t just you being a terrible dev, it took me some research to figure out enough to write my answer... (At some point I’ll probably suggest a patch to the docs.) – Stephen Kitt Jun 26 '20 at 07:32
  • Thank you Stephen. I too took some time before posting my question but I had no luck... Again, thank you for the answer you provided. I'd personally like to stay in touch since I'd like to more about Debian and it's community. Idk if that's something I'm allowed to say here... – tinnick Jun 26 '20 at 09:17