Joey has been
+campaigning
+for a while to get everything in the archive changed to depend on
+debconf | debconf-2.0 or similar rather than just
+debconf, in order that we can start rolling out
+cdebconf as its replacement. Like most jobs that involve
+touching the bulk of the archive, this looks set to take quite a while, as
+the list of bugs should
+indicate.
Recently it occurred to me that we didn't necessarily have to do it that
+way round. In a bout of late-night hacking while staying awake to look after
+a sick child (he seems mostly OK now, although the rushed trip to the
+hospital earlier was a bit on the nerve-wracking side), I've shuffled things
+around in the cdebconf package so that it no longer has any file conflicts
+with debconf or debconf-doc, and changed the debconf confmodule to fire up
+the cdebconf frontend rather than its own if the
+DEBCONF_USE_CDEBCONF environment variable is non-empty. (The
+details of this may change before it actually gets uploaded, as I'd like to
+get Joey to look it over and approve it first.) This allows you to install
+cdebconf, set that environment variable, and play around with cdebconf with
+relative ease; when we come to switch to cdebconf for real, instead of a
+huge conflicting mess that apt will probably have trouble resolving, it'll
+just be a matter of changing a couple of lines in
+/usr/share/debconf/confmodule.
Of course, don't expect cdebconf to be a complete working replacement for +debconf just yet; if you try using it for a dist-upgrade run it'll fall +over. Due to its d-i heritage, it doesn't yet load templates automatically; +that has to be done by hand. Frontend names differ from debconf's, which +will need some migration code. At the moment it can only handle UTF-8 +templates, which are mandated in the installer but only optional in the rest +of the system. It doesn't have all of debconf's rich array of database +modules. I haven't adapted the Perl or Python confmodules yet. The list goes +on. However, I think we at least stand a chance of getting a handle on the +problem now.
+ +(I'll post this article to debian-devel once the changes have been +reviewed and uploaded.)