improve license/EULA accept user experience

[Alexander Sack]

Hi,

packages that ask for EULA accept typically use a debconf question and store the user reponse in a debconf key, like shared/leb-license-v1.1-accepted

With current lmc, it's inconvenient that a user gets asked to accept the same license once for EACH target install.

fix is to remember shared/leb-license* keys and put them back in place for next target rootfs. In this way you only need to accept a license once on your host.

basically:
1. unpack rootfs
2. inject saved license debconf keys on the target
3. install hwpack
4. save all license debconf keys after the run to the host
...

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

This is quite important to get the install experience for LEBs right.

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2011 21:54:47 -0000, Alexander Sack <email address hidden> wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Hi,
>
> packages that ask for EULA accept typically use a debconf question and
> store the user reponse in a debconf key, like shared/leb-
> license-v1.1-accepted
>
> With current lmc, it's inconvenient that a user gets asked to accept the
> same license once for EACH target install.
>
> fix is to remember shared/leb-license* keys and put them back in place
> for next target rootfs. In this way you only need to accept a license
> once on your host.

Hi,

A couple of comments/questions.

1) Are the LEBs themselves going to have EULAs?

2) What about EULAs for things in hwpacks. I guess we want to treat them
the same?

3) We probably want a whitelist here as you suggest, as re-using the
whole debconf configuration would probably lead to many problems.

Thanks,

James

[Fathi Boudra (fboudra)]

We have a use case now: Snowball. hwpack has EULA and we do pre-built images that requires EULA.
This issue should be fixed for automated validation.

> 1) Are the LEBs themselves going to have EULAs?

The response to the question is yes.

> 2) What about EULAs for things in hwpacks. I guess we want to treat them
the same?

yes.

[Anmar Oueja (anmar)]

ST-Ericsson is working on eliminating the click through license for all their binary pieces.

[Mattias Backman (mabac)]

Meanwhile Lee Jones is working on removing the startfiles from the hwpacks altogether and provide firmware upgrade images when needed. This means that there would be no package in Snowball hwpacks with an EULA.

[Anmar Oueja (anmar)]

Kalle: If you are too busy to work on this, please let me know. It is important we get this resolved sooner than later due to LAVA dependency.

[Kalle Vahlman (kvahlman)]

If someone provides me a patch, I can surely find time to integrate and push new packages to PPA "whenever", but currently not able to figure out how to implement this (I'm not 100% familiar with debconf stuff it so it would take a bit of time).

[Kalle Vahlman (kvahlman)]

The old way of prompting was that every package gets prompted for agreement every time.

I've now pushed packages for lbsd, mali400, startupfiles and ux500-firmware which are the packages with the licensing agreement. The new semantics are:

First package to be installed will prompt for agreement.

Later packages will only state in the output that the license was accepted, or ask again if it wasn't.

To get the prompt again, ALL of the packages with the agreement need to be PURGED.

Please reopen and let me know if this level of caching the answer is a problem. I think we can add postrm hooks to clear the answer so that it will be re-asked if a licensed package is removed, not purged. But I don't think that is required as we do always display a (non-interactive) reminder that the licensing is in effect.

This should allow injecting the following keys into debconf database to enable non-interactive installs:

(needs to be seen)
* ste-lla/license:
(needs to be seen and true)
* ste-lla/accepted: true

[Paul Larson (pwlars)]

I suspect this doesn't quite do what we want. We're creating images with linaro-media-create each time, not simply upgrading a package. In fact, if my understanding is correct, this could even break our current workarounds which just detect the license text and respond with the proper sequence of tabs and enters to accept the aggreement. Understand, that workaround which we've implemented for now is something we *want* to get rid of, but we first need a way that we can auto accept or pre-accept the license in the packages when they are installed via linaro-media-create.

[Kalle Vahlman (kvahlman)]

If it wasn't clear, the license prompt will not be shown at all if the debconf keys are set, so this indeed will allow you to pre-accept the license.

When the debconf keys are set, the package install will simply print "blah license already accepted" in the console.

I might have broken the workarounds though, since while otherwise untouched I did alter the headline of the license from "snowball click-wrap" to "ST-Ericsson Limited License Agreement" to match the name we use of it on the igloo site. But not sure how the detection works, and in any case you should be able to implement a proper way to pre-accept now.

[Kalle Vahlman (kvahlman)]

Not hearing complaints so I assume we are good wrt our packaging solution...

[Alan Bennett (akbennett)]

Due to the age of this issue, we are acknowledging that this issue will likely not be fixed, is no longer applicable, or was already fixed by an indirect change. If this issue is still important, please add details and reopen the issue.