Re: Configuration frontend
>>>>> "WA" == Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl> writes:
WA> Wrong. dpkg-question is evil in that it only allows you to
WA> answer a single question at a time. That is silly of course,
WA> and it makes lots of sense to group questions together and ask
WA> them all at once in a single screen/dialog/webpage/whatever.
Okay, that is a very good point. However, how do you then deal with
interdependencies between variables (ie, when the nth question you ask
is dependent upon the n-1th)? I agree to a large extent with you, and
this is something that I would suggest resolving in a later stage,
perhaps by variable substitution in config files.
WA> Also another *very* important aspect is that we can change the
WA> degree of interactivity of the install. Did you see how many
WA> people were complaining on debian-devel a while ago about all
WA> the interactivity? It's really horrible if you are managing
WA> things like clusters or labrooms. Most users also don't care
WA> about most questions.
I think yo (and a number of other people) are missing the main point
of dpkg-config - it *doesn't* *have* to ask the user. The entire point
of dpkg-config is the ability to reroute the request/response process
elsewhere, be it a database or whatever, and to do it selectively, so
you can ask a question only if the answer does not exist in an already
available form. There is no reason why you cannot support priority and
default tags on a per-variable basis, so that unless a user *asks* to
see every configuration variable (or a subset containing the relevant
one), it just assumes the default.
>> o Making a more flexible configuration language that will
>> simplify the task of making configuration scripts.
WA> That isn't planned at all.
This was being discussed at the time that I posted tihs.
WA> We started this discussion back in may actually, so you can't
WA> say we're jumping into this..
Fabulous. Where's the code? I'm sure that you and others have
snippets that implement one idea or another, but you're planning a
pretty grandiose implementation here, and unless you're building from
an already existing codebase that at least implements *something*,
you're jumping headlong into it. Currently, the only code that I've
seen is the quick bash implementation of dpkg-config that I posted a
while back.
m.
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