Avoiding prompts on first install

[CyrilBrulebois]

At the moment, we document that three prompts show up during a fresh install, about:

• Saving IPv4 rules (defaults to yes, must answer no).
• Saving IPv6 rules (defaults to yes, must answer no).
• Allows non-root users to capture packets (defaults to no, must answer yes).

I'm not sure it'd be a good idea or if it's even possible, but maybe we could look into preseeding different default values, possibly even marking those questions as read, maybe from a pirogue-base.preinst?

In the general case, such things should be covered by an installation/deployment system (debian-installer, Foreman/Puppet, etc.), but with our “product-oriented” approach, that might be acceptable.

[CyrilBrulebois]

Unfortunately, at least the package-based approach seems to be very unlikely, as the very beginning of the install process (right after downloading) looks like this:

Fetched 525 MB in 19s (27.1 MB/s)                                                                                                                            
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...

and prompts show up immediately, long before dpkg even knows about the pirogue-base binary package.

In hindsight, it would probably best to preseed those answers during the image build process. This is actually where such things belong, as written in my tentative comments while still thinking about it:

# The PTS project is using a product-based approach, and we want to make
# everything as easy as possible to users. Altering debconf settings for other
# packages would usually be a no-no in the Debian world, that seems acceptable
# in our specific case.

[CyrilBrulebois]

I'm pushing my failed attempt as the following branch, so that remains available until that gets moved into and tested with the pirogue-images repository: https://github.com/PiRogueToolSuite/deb-packages/tree/issue-32-deadend

[CyrilBrulebois]

Using debconf-set-selections -v within toaster recipes seems much more promising:

info: Trying to set 'iptables-persistent/autosave_v4' [boolean] to 'false'
info: Loading answer for 'iptables-persistent/autosave_v4'
info: Trying to set 'seen' flag to 'true'
info: Setting seen flag
info: Trying to set 'iptables-persistent/autosave_v6' [boolean] to 'false'
info: Loading answer for 'iptables-persistent/autosave_v6'
info: Trying to set 'seen' flag to 'true'
info: Setting seen flag
info: Trying to set 'wireshark-common/install-setuid' [boolean] to 'true'
info: Loading answer for 'wireshark-common/install-setuid'
info: Trying to set 'seen' flag to 'true'
info: Setting seen flag

[CyrilBrulebois]

Merged a few days ago and confirmed OK.

I'm keeping this issue open until after we've had a release published with these changes. Then we can think about maybe scrubbing the website (instructions + screenshots).