On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 10:32:38PM +0200, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote: > > I am working on creating a package for UserLinux which will configure > > several packages with sensible defaults for an authentication server. At > > the moment, that means samba, slapd, pam and nss, but will also include > > heimdal later on. > > My naive question is: is there currently any mechanism for forcing the > > user to configure package x from within package y, and/or for > > reconfiguring one package based on reconfiguring another? Current trends are centered on debconf preseeding and on installing cfengine scripts. I'm at the moment at a mini italian mini debconf, discussing with Marco d'Itri about this topic. One of the suggestions that came out is using dpkg diversions. I remember diversions came out in the past, and I don't remember how come they didn't come out again. Was there something wrong with them? Thinking about them now, they will allow a package to "take responsibility" for the configuratin of another, and give the other package back its configuration when the former one is deinstalled. This would allow to do things like removing a CDD and having back the original behaviour, it would allow sane upgrades, switching from one CDD to the other... The only problem I can see is if I install A, then B[diverts cfg of A], then I change by hand that configuration, then deinstall B: in that case, my changes won't be fed back in A's configuration. However, that problem is not even addressed by the other approaches, and I may not be a problem at all (that is, I don't know how sane would he having this feature at all). Another possibility would be to make a small change to dpkg to ask what it should do when undiverting configuration files that have been changed by the user. Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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