Re: ntp 4.2.0 in experimental
On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 06:34:16AM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Marco d'Itri (md@Linux.IT):
> > But debconf is not supposed to be a generic way to push configuration to
> > hosts.
>
> If it technically can, why not?
But the problem is that the Debconf subsystem in packages aren't typically
written to fully configure an application, and for any non-trivial program
the configuration script would be huge and complex.
The case at hand - configuration of a default set of NTP servers, should be
relatively simple to support via Debconf (from my rather superficial look at
the maintainer scripts), but is also easily supported via any other
automatic configuration method (FAI, cfengine, rdist, sup, etc, ad
infinitum).
In general, major configuration shouldn't be handled by Debconf, because the
complexity of maintainer scripts increase faster than linear as more options
are handled. Domain-specific configurations, such as those needed by custom
debian distributions and local setups, really need to be handled some other
way.
For the person who was asking why we have an LDAP storage unit for debconf,
I'll answer that as the person who wrote it[1]. While it is true that
Debconf is not a registry, there are still a large number of options for
which there are no options, or which are programmed into Debconf for which
you might need a different setting. Storing those values in Debconf is
definitely recommended.
[1] I wrote it for an internal project which got cancelled soon after I'd
finished writing the module. I've since not been in a situation where I've
been able to practically use the module, and that's why it hasn't had a lot
of support or continued development.
- Matt
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