VERSION number This exchanges with the frontend the protocol version number that is being used. The current version is 2.1. Versions in the 2.x series will be backwards-compatible. You may specify the protocol version number you are speaking. The frontend will return the version of the protocol it speaks. If the version you specify is too low, this command will return the numeric return code 30. CAPB capabilities This exchanges with the frontend a list of supported capabilities Capabilities both the frontend and your confmodule support may be used; the capabilities supported by the frontend are returned by this command. capability description backup Backing up to a previous step is supported. escape The frontend expects commands sent to it to have backslashes and newlines quoted as \\ and \n respectively and will in turn quote backslashes and newlines in its replies. See debconf-escape 1. multiselect The multiselect data type is supported. You do not need to check this capability if you depend on any modern version of debconf. SETTITLE template You can use this command to set a title in the frontend. This may appear in different ways, depending on the frontend being used, for example it might change the title of the frontend's window. If you don't specify anything, a title will automatically be generated. Using a template has the advantage that titles are translatable and that they can be maintained in the same place as other text displayed to users. TITLE string Similar to SETTITLE, but takes a string instead of a template as parameter. Consequence is that the title will not be translatable, unless some other mechanism (like gettext) is used. STOP This command tells the frontend you're done talking to it. Typically the frontend can detect the termination of your program and this command is not necessary. INPUT priority question This tells the frontend to display a question (or other type of item) to the user. question is the name of the item to display, all other information about the item is retrieved from the templates described previously. priority is how important it is that the user be prompted. The frontend need only ask this question if the priority is high enough. The question is not displayed until a go command is given. This allows us to ask multiple questions in a single screen. Once a question has been displayed to the user and the user has provided input, the frontend will set the seen flag. &priority_table; Note that the frontend decides if the user is actually prompted or not. If the user has already answered a question, they are normally not asked it again even if input is called again. And if the user is ignoring low priority items, they will not see them. In either of these cases, this command returns the numeric return code 30. BEGINBLOCK ENDBLOCK Some frontends are able to display a number of items to the user at once. To do this, they need to be given blocks of input commands, enclosed in the BEGINBLOCK and ENDBLOCK commands. Blocks can be nested and very advanced frontends may use this as a user interface hint. There is an implicit block around any set of INPUT commands that are not enclosed in an explicit block. GO Shows the current set of accumulated items to the user and lets them fill in values, etc. If the backup capability is supported and the user indicates they want to back up a step, this command returns the numeric return code 30. CLEAR Clears the accumulated set of INPUT commands without displaying them to the user. GET question Ask the frontend to tell you how the user answered a question. The value is returned to you. SET question value Set the answer of a question to a value. RESET question Reset the question to its default value. This includes resetting flags to their defaults. SUBST question key value Questions (and other items) can have substitutions embedded in their descriptions (and, currently in their choices fields). These substitutions look like "${key}". When the question is displayed, the substitutions are replaced with their values. This command can be used to set the value of a substitution. FGET question flag Questions (and other items) can have flags associated with them. The flags have a value of "true" or "false". This command returns the value of a flag. FSET question flag value This sets the state of a flag on a question. Valid states for the flag are "true" and "false". One common flag is the "seen" flag. It is normally only set if a user already seen a question. Typically, frontends only display questions to users if they have the seen flag set to "false". Sometimes you want the user to see a question again -- in these cases you can set the seen flag to false to force the frontend to redisplay it. Note that as a special convenience behavior, frontends will redisplay already seen questions if the question was first seen by the user in the same confmodule run. This makes it easy for a confmodule to back up to previous questions without having to reset the seen flag. METAGET question field This returns the value of any field of a question (the description, for example). REGISTER template question This creates a new question that is bound to a template. By default each template has an associated question with the same name. However, any number of questions can really be associated with a template, and this lets you create more such questions. UNREGISTER question This removes a question from the database. PURGE Call this in your postrm when your package is purged. It removes all templates and questions your package has generated.