Re: Goals for 1.3?

[Winfried Truemper <winni@xpilot.org>]

On Sat, 21 Dec 1996, Marek Michalkiewicz wrote:

> Hmm, I feel a little nervous about putting thigs like
> 
> SULOGIN=`cfgtool --get boot.sulogin`
> 
> at the very beginning of /etc/init.d/boot.  Why not just:
>
> . /etc/default/boot

Yes, you're right. :-)

I've experimented with "cfgdb" this weekend and it's much too slow for too
little gain. I mean, we deal with static information and there is no good
reason to convert the settings for the shell to read on the fly.


> and have a tool to modify (carefully - create the new file with
> different name, fsync() it, then rename() it) files containing
> name=value pairs - the shell already gives us all the tools we
> need to read them.  Are there any problems with this?

Too complicated. Just don't modify the file you want to source in. ;-)


On Sat, 21 Dec 1996, Winfried Truemper (thats me) wrote:

> My understanding of "defaults" are "fallback values" which should be used
> until I specify other ones. But I would never overwrite those defaults
> because then they wouldn't be defaults any longer (according to my
> definition).

Yes, but the rest what I wrote was nonsense. Too many ideas mixed up.
The easiest way to implement defaults (in the sense of "apllication
defaults") is to source in twice:

        . /etc/defaults/boot
        . /etc/script-env/boot

Only the last file is for modification by the sysadmin. Most of the 
inconveniences we have today with upgrading cripts from /etc/init.d/
should vanish with this.

"cfgdb" is of little use now but expect it's successor to appear as
"cfgmgr" in a much more generall version soon.

-Winfried


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-devel-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com