KISS

[Chris Leishman <masklin@debian.org>]

Hi all,

I've been away for a bit, so I've missed some of the stuff thats gone on -
appologies if I restate anything.

What I have seen of the posts to this lists is some very complex solutions
(that would be tricky to implement smoothly) and some people looking for
simple solutions (KISS priciple) to allow quick implementation.

I have also heard mention of a configuration database, and people claiming
this would not be simple to implement.  Why not?

For a nice, simple configuration database we could impliment a package that
contains three utilities:

	1.  A utility to query the database (returns an answer if it is available
	    or nothing.
	2.  A utility to add a entry into the database (ie. mailname=debian.org)
	3.  A utility to modify an entry into the database.


Now how is this simple?  Well, to make a package non-interactive the
maintainer simply needs to make the package depend on the database package and
then extract answers to configuration queries from there.  If the answer is
unavailable then the question could be asked and added to the database (not 
ideal, but simple for now) or the configuration stalled until an appropriate
time to add new database entries.

The database could also come with a collection of normal configuration needs
(such as mailname, hostname, ntp servers, etc, etc) and more could be added
later by filing bugs against the database package.  The installation of this 
package is the only one that needs to be interactive (you get to provide 
answers to all the queries).  In the long run dpkg could be modified to only
ask questions relating to the packages about to be installed (if the answers
aren't known allready), or any other time saving enhancements.


Is there a problem with this sort of approach?


Best regards in the new year,

Chris




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