Re: Summary of the workshop on CDDs held in Valencia
On Fri, 14 May 2004, Free Ekanayaka wrote:
> Yeah, but it's missing you taking that icy bath.
Icy? What do you mean?
If you mean "refreshing" like having some ice cream - yes. ;-)
> we should ask maddog for that ;)
You do not have to ask Maddog because he copied them to my USB stick when
we were sitting together at the airport ...
http://people.debian.org/~tille/valencia/beach/
I just cutted the borders a little bit ...
> Andreas> I guess Jon would like to pronounced as Jon "maddog" Hall
> Andreas> ... ;-) But this is not so important as perhaps RMS want
> Andreas> you to pronounce the GNU in front of Linux. :)
>
> Ooops. I thought it was kind of polite/respect not inserting the nick,
> but I understand Jon may think the opposite :/
At least it was my feeling that Jon wants to be called "Maddog".
> Andreas> Time to upload the first meta packages. ;-)
>
> Well, I'm eager to do that. But awfully I'm not a Debian maintainer
> yet :/
Ask for sponsoring. If all else fails I'll go for it.
> Moreover I'm a little bit worried by the fact that the current
> strategy adopted by the task packges (i.e. depending on a bunch of
> other packages) is seen as a possible source of problems by some
> people (see the recent post from Joey Hess on debian-edu).
Perhaps we should wait if DebConf brings some news. The problems are known
but no better solution currently.
> Well I think your explanation of the issue is quite clear. I'm not
> sure of what is the next move now, whether to try to raise the issue
> on debian-devel or to keep on collecting ideas till we have better
> picture of the scene.
See what will happen at DebConf.
> I'm Ccing this mail to Martin madkiss to see if there are any news
> from the Debian Desktop team on this issue.
Good idea.
> Andreas thanks a lot for this neat summary. I think it really gets the
> point. I would just add that cfengine (or ucf or whatever) could be
> used not only to write an external configuration script for packages
> which do not accept a certain patch, but even as a complement to
> debconf.
May be that's reasonable but there is no difference regarding to our
decision where to place these files. I guess the placement should be
defined for better reference. The actual usage is done by the maintainer
of the package in the postinst / whatever script and I currently see no
point in defining certain things how this should be done.
> In this view debconf would be used as frontend to ask questions and a
> database to store/retrive answers, while cfengine would be used by the
> postinst scripts as a sort of library to modify the configuration
> files according to the deconf values.
>
> I don't know whether this approach is correct or not, but currently
> even the simple use of debconf as a database for configuration values
> is not widely accepted.
I would leave it to every maintainers decision what tool to use to access
debconf database. I see no conflict in using cfengine and if a maintainer
of a set of CDD packages decides to use cfengine it seems reasonable to
do some unification here. If an other maintainer to go a different way -
hey it is free and the user will not notice it if the system is configured
as expected afterwards.
> For example see:
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/02/msg00801.html [I've already posted this..]
>
> and
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/04/msg01531.html
>
> Maybe we should include these links in the document.
Hmmm, if you think so. I see no real new information here. Perhaps you
might provide a complete paragraph which explains more detailed in how far
these links clarify the problem.
> That's great. It's really important to keep this document up to date,
> so that our discussions do not over when a workshop is over or when a
> thread is dead.
Well, if I'm a lousy programmer I can at least do something to keep people
informed what's going on. ;-)
Kind regards
Andreas.
Reply to: