Re: AutoRPM

[Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com>]

Steve Dunham <dunham@cps.msu.edu> wrote:
>  1. Variable setting (boolean and string-valued settings)
>  2. Scripts that take the values and configure the package
>  3. Batch operations (glimpse/man indexing, menu creation)
>  4. Custom interactive programs. (X configuration, maybe MIME
>     configuration).

I think that some prompts depend on information gleaned from the system
at postinst time.

More generally, I think that we should look at the requirements of the
postinst scripts, rather than their implementations. They'll have to
be re-written anyways, and there's usually more than one approach to a
problem.

Finally, we need to think a bit about what we really want to accomplish.
In many cases, a person will pick a package off a list because it looks
interesting. But, then, it will require some significant investment of
effort to get up to speed on the package.  Other packages need
in-depth information about system configuration (e.g. X).   Other
packages just need a few tweaks here and there...o

In my opinion, we could do with a "configuration procedures dock".
This would overlap slightly with what our postinst currently does,
but would also be a place to register docs as being important to be
read for a package, and for config programs not currently appropriate
for postinst.

But this needs some thought -- otherwise we wind up with a system
that's painful to use.

-- 
Raul


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