gregoa's blog

pbuilder & debconf

when I tried to build jabref with pdebuild (i.e. in a pbuilder chroot) it failed because jabref needs the sun-java* packages and they need a "yes I agree with this funny license" confirmation on installation -- which just failed in the chroot. for some time I thought that it was "logical" that pbuilder cannot answer debconf questions but then I found out that this can be changed quite easily:

$ grep -A 2 debconf /etc/pbuilderrc # or ~/.pbuilderrc
# make debconf not interact with user
# export DEBIAN_FRONTEND="noninteractive"
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND="readline"

source: file:///usr/share/doc/pbuilder/pbuilder-doc.html#debconfinsidepbuilder

I didn't change this permanently but for the rare cases where automatic installation fails it's an easy way.

gregoa, 2006-07-20