On Sat, Jan 09, 1999 at 02:19:35AM +0100, Torsten Landschoff wrote: > 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. How about something more like: mail-transport-agent/smarthost and exim/realtime-blocking-list ? > 3. Some way to generate a default value, perhaps a little sh script. Example: > Networking/NIS/Defaultdomainname could have "hostname -f" as default > value. "current" value would seem more accurate than "default", here. Possibly two (optional) scripts: one to get the current value, and one to store it. Getting the current value would, as you say, do things like hostname -f, while setting the current value would do things like echo to /etc/mailname. If neither was to be provided, a more complicated (general) configuration database would then be used. Actually, it'd probably be used in any case. > 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. Defaulting unknown types to string would probably be useful (so a networked program can specify "IPv6-address" as a type, and even though the admintool doesn't know about IPv6 yet, it can still be given a string without major complaint). > > * 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 Doing this will make it impossible to do a partial upgrade to unstable packages, without getting a new dpkg (or whatever dpkg-option is in). And if the packages don't all Pre-Depend on dpkg >> 5.6.7.8, this won't ensure the correctness of apt upgrades, even. I think this is something to avoid. Cheers, aj, who thinks he might try doing a linux-kernel style configuration thing just to see how it works. -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred. ``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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