On Tue, Jan 05, 1999 at 05:09:38PM -0500, Brian Ristuccia wrote:
> Is there an official list of goals around somewhere?
>
> I plan to write up code and an example package to before the end of break to
> meet the goals I'm listing below. If I can satisy other people at the same
> time, it would be even cooler.
>
> * Ability to query a package for configurable options.
What about another file in control.tar.gz called "options". This would carry
the list of options the package MIGHT need, with the following information
about each option:
1. Identifier
We should think about some kind of path as the identifier as
Internet/Mail/Smarthost
so we implement a program which can generate an appropriate database.
2. Description (in English)
Description of the option. We could provide Language-Modules later which
should contain Indentifier/Description pairs.
3. Some way to generate a default value, perhaps a little sh script. Example:
Networking/NIS/Defaultdomainname could have "hostname -f" as default
value.
4. Type of the information. E.g. String, Hostname/IP, Network, ...
Everything should be represented as ASCII-Text in my opinion so we can
stuff it in every database we want.
> * Should be able to vary options based on currently installed software,
> system configuration, etc. (ie, dhcpcd should present the user with a
> list of valid interfaces to choose from).
Easy if we say the option has type "network interface". Simple generate a list
of available interfaces with ifconfig.
> * Ability to store those options somewhere, for use on the same system, or
> optionally on other systems as well.
The postinst-script could just call dpkg-option to get the desired value. For
example
echo `dpkg-option Networking/NIS/Defaultdomainname` >/etc/defaultdomain
The default dpkg-option should just evaluate the information in the options
file from control.tar.gz and ask for the information required as it used to
be.
Then you can replace dpkg-option by everything you want for example to query a
configuration server in your local net.
> * Ability for a package to validate configurable options without actually
> configuring or installing anything, and present error messages in a
> presentation-independant format.
>
> * Options specified in a presentation-independant format.
>
> * Time consuming tasks to provide completion status information in a
> presentation-independant format.
Oh yes that would be great.
> * Minimal modifications to existing package management tools, backwards
> compatibility where possible.
After all when I look into this list I do not see goals but implementation
details... :)
cu
Torsten
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