How do I provide dpkg configuration parameters to aptitude or apt-get?

When installing gitolite I find that:

# aptitude install gitolite
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gitolite 
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 29 not upgraded.
Need to get 114 kB of archives. After unpacking 348 kB will be used.
Get:1 http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates/main gitolite all 1.5.4-2+squeeze1 [114 kB]
Fetched 114 kB in 0s (202 kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously deselected package gitolite.
(Reading database ... 30593 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking gitolite (from .../gitolite_1.5.4-2+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
Setting up gitolite (1.5.4-2+squeeze1) ...
No adminkey given - not initializing gitolite in /var/lib/gitolite.

The last line is of interest to me. If I run dpkg-reconfigure -plow gitolite I am presented with a dialog and can modify:

the system user name for gitolite,
the location of the gitolite repositories and
provide the admin pubkey.

I'd prefer to use the git system user and provide the admin pubkey on installation, say something of the sort:

# aptitude install gitolite --user git --admin-pubkey 'ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAACAQDAc7kCAi2WkvqpAL1fK1sIw6xjpatJ+Ms2nrwLJPhdovEY3MPZF7mtH+rv1CHFDn66fLGiWevOFp...'

That, of course, doesn't work. Can something similar be done? How do I determine the configuration parameters ahead of time? This would be remarkably useful, for instance, when installing gitolite automatically, via puppet or chef.

I haven't tested this, but I believe that after you run your dpkg-reconfigure on an example machine, you can run debconf-get-selections | egrep "^gitolite\s" to get what was set. (it's in the debconf-utils package if you don't have it).

Then on the CLI, debconf-set-selections $FILENAME before running apt.

Then with puppet it would be something like:

file {
  "/var/cache/debconf/gitolite.preseed":
     source => '...'; # someplace with that output
}
package {
  "gitolite":
    require      => File["/var/cache/debconf/gitolite.preseed"],
    responsefile => "/var/cache/debconf/gitolite.preseed";
}

More info on puppet's site:

https://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Debian_Preseed_Patterns
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Debian_Patterns
https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/7/types/package.html

I suspect Chef has a similar mechanism for specifying a responsefile or preseed file or something like that, but I'm not a Chef user.

You need to provide a preseed to work around this. See how it is done for Java in this module. I find that the easiest way to get a preseed file is to do a manual installation and configuration first, and then getting the seed from that. This blog has a good example of this.

How do I provide dpkg configuration parameters to aptitude or apt-get?

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