Changing priorities

I’m scripting some sys admin tasks in Debian which require the installation of packages like Postfix. I don’t want it to prompt me with questions, so I knew I had to set the priority to something higher for this specific package (i.e. temporarily). There doesn’t appear to be a way to pass this to an apt-get command (which was a little disappointing) but debconf can set it system wide under /var/cache/debconf/config.dat, but that’s, well, ugly.

Turns out there’s an environment variable you can set to achieve what I want, DEBIAN_PRIORITY. So exporting this variable and unsetting it post install will do the trick, but I still think apt-get -p critical install postfix would be better 🙂

-c

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