Re: Goals for 1.3?
Winfried Truemper:
> Indeed. That's the current compromise discussed in debian-admintool:
Is this debian-admintool list archived anywhere? I probably missed
most of the discussion...
> hardcode the defaults into the script and source in a central file to
> overwrite these defaults.
I still think one small file for each package might be better - it would
be marked as a conffile for this package. The big central file has some
problems:
- more potential damage if it is ever corrupted (much like /usr/info/dir)
- it could get very long if there are many packages (each with its own
settings), slowing down system startup (the entire file with all the
settings has to be parsed by every startup script, even if it only
needs 3 of total 300 configuration values)
- how would it be handled by dpkg? small per-package files can be handled
as conffiles (and the init.d scripts no longer need to be conffiles)
Just like we use many /etc/rc?.d/* files instead of one big rc.local file,
I think we should use many small config files instead of one big file.
If one file gets corrupted, only one package is affected. Files are
short and fast to parse. The file name clearly identifies the package.
You can configure only selected packages by unpacking a tar file which
contains only a few config files (no special tools required for that).
> fallback-defaults nor do we need to source in little shell-scripts like I
> proposed (the problem with them is not the space they eat up but the fact
> that they would only contain 3-4 settings each).
I don't see why a small number of settings would be a problem. Many
settings in one file - yes, slow, possibly O(N*N) for N packages (each
package reads settings for all other packages too).
Marek
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