Re: Open letter to Debian community (fwd)
On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 06:19:02AM +0100, Jiri Klouda wrote:
> Why no one responds to the part about daemons, check for services or some
> kind of registry and the IMHO very important remark about packages you might
> want to have installed, but not run time from time.
I think most of this was already discussed at some point in the past and
dismissed for various reasons. Nobody stepped up to provide a detailed
technical proposal that could reopen the discussion with fresh arguments, so
nobody is going to bother about that. You should check the mailing list
archive, although I grant you that it won't be easy to find in all the
traffic Debian creates.
> But there might be other reasons.. I think that every software that runs
> as daemon or service should have an option to be turned off and this should
> be definitely a policy matter.
You can make a proper proposal on debian-policy (be sure to provide a patch
with the exact wording), which will then be discussed and seconded or
ignored because of lack of interest. But try to check the archive for past
discussion of this.
> On the other hand, the networking thing is really bad in debian. I think
> that it would be nice if we would get this solved. I for one would really
> welcome to be able to change network identity of computer easy. Moving my
> whole computer to a different place, with different host, domain name, ip
> address is not so uncommon... This should be also a matter of long term
> policy, so Debian could get to state where this is possible.
Again, you feel the need for it, you can try to fix it. When you have an
independant solution in a package, you don't need to reach an agreement,
just include it in Debian (or get it included). If it requires some policy
change, the same door is open to you as for the daemon thing.
Just demanding that somebody works on this for you is just not going to
work. You can ask for help on this, but if nobody is interested, you have to
live with it.
The more concrete your suggestion is, the higher are your chances for
success (that means, rather than to demand that daemons are configurable,
provide a patch for the policy or packaging manual and a working solution
that makes it easy to convert daemons to the new infrastructure. Or, even
better, provide a solution that doesn't require any changes there and works
on top of it. For example, for daemons, a runlevel editor that integrates
with debconf and update-alternatives would work just as fine. People could
install your runlevel-edit package and disable xdm there, without needing
any changes in the xdm package).
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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