Re: CDD and Debconf
On Sat, 29 May 2004, Cosimo Alfarano wrote:
> On Sat, May 29, 2004 at 07:05:03PM -0300, Enrico Zini wrote:
> > 1) Do everything with standard Debian packages, configured with Debconf
> > Preseeding (when possible)
> > 2) When this fails, tweak config using cfengine, sharing the tweaks
> > with other groups
> That's cool, but doesn't it break policy? (only conffile onwer
> may modify conffiles)
> That's not clear to me.
Surely it is the way to go to send patches to the package owner to
enable debconf configuration of the package in question. This would
allow clean and policy compliant configuration.
On the other hand if the maintainer refuses to accept these patches
the local administrator has to do adaptations to the config file.
If we agree that for the CDD issue has this change to be made in the
same way we could give the local administrator "a helping hand" - this
is what CDD are good for. ;-)
This helping hand can be a cfengine (or whatever we decide) script which
modifies the config file in the needed way. There is no point in forcing
local administrators doing always the same stuff all over the world to
do the same stuff only because a package maintainer (who might have
perfectly acceptable reasons!) refuse to accept a patch. Thus a cfengine
script takes over the local administrator role - not less or more.
> virtualized testing distro.
> Putting it in an external repository breaks the 100%-Debian idea.
Sure and we should avoid this wherever possible. Unfortunately there
are cases where people depend from non-free software in the real
world (think of Squeak for the education related distros). This
unfortunately has to be outside of Debian. This is not really
a CDD issue (because we are inside Debian) but recommending this
to external forks to do as much as a CDD and maintain only the last
bit which is not possible to put inside increases acceptance of the
CDD approach to people who did a fork.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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