>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Brown <broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk> writes:
Mark> One thing you can try to do is to have the debconf config
Mark> script try to set itself up with the values in the
Mark> configuration file and only update the bits of the
Mark> configuration file it understands. This is revolting, very
Mark> hard for many kinds of configuration file and error-prone
Mark> but it should generally do what the user expects until we
Mark> start getting multiple debconf databases.
What I would like (not that I have heaps of time), is some formal way
of altering config files, but without leaving all the work to the
package maintainer. It would have to be done in such a way to cope
with any format, and with unexpected user customisations.
Thinking out loud here, not sure if this would really work:
What if you had some file that described the format of the config
file, eg
<file name="/etc/lynx.cfg">
<config search="/^STARTFILE:(.*)$/" debconf="lynx/defaulturl"/>
</file>
which, for instance, would say how put the value of debconf into the
STARTFILE: config setting for lynx.cfg, without affecting anything
else.
While this simple example wouldn't work everywhere (eg bind and
apache), I think it demonstrates the point I am trying to get across.
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>