When viewing a diff, button functions are deceptive

[Reginald Lowack]

when choosing what to do with menu.lst while updating i did "show 3 way differ" and then "Cancel"
after telling me that there was an error installation continued.
All was fine just the menu.lst wasnt changed at all, so the old kernel was loaded by default.
Changed it by hand to 2.6.27.11 and all was ok.

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The problem is that the Cancel and Forward options presented have counter-intuitive functions. Cancel appears to be used for going back, and Forward appears to be used for accepting the changes. The solution should be to only have one button which takes the user back to the previous dialog.

[Hew (hew)]

Thanks for your report. Changing sourcepackage to debconf, which I hope is correct.

I have had a similar experience to you in the past, where (from memory) the options Cancel and Forward are presented at the diff. When the user thinks "I don't want to do this", they want to hit the back option, so Cancel appears to be the most appropriate. It is not obvious that Forward is how you go back, as it is reasonable to expect that the merge action would be performed.

Only a single option should be available when viewing the diff. If the user wishes to Do Nothing, they will select that option from the drop down menu.

[Mark Grandi (markgrandi)]

Also, since my bug was listed as a duplicate of this one, if you press cancel, it leaves wahtever package unconfigured and then causes broken packages

but then colin replied to my bug report:

"For what it's worth, it doesn't break the package manager at all - any
package management frontend worth its salt can recover easily, or you
can run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' from a terminal."

Well, i am a fairly experienced linux user, and I did not know about that command, i had only known about apt-get -f install and that could not fix it, i had to run some other command to run pending configure scripts after poking around the ubuntu+1 irc channel for help (maybe that is it?)

point is, if a user accidentally hits cancel, then thats going to cause broken packages, and a normal user is not going to know how to run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a" in a terminal to fix it, and its going to cause frustration ( as it did for me)

I think that there should be no way of exiting out of debconf...and instead just forcing the user to make a decision, to prevent leaving packages unconfigured

[Hew (hew)]

Agreed. By having only the one button available, the user will be taken back to the available choices. Exiting in a broken state will not be possible.