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Re: stop the "manage with debconf" madness



On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 05:06:15PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-04-18 at 13:54, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > 	If we standardize on a easy to interpret format for these
> >  files, I'll add the logic to ucf to handle these directives. (how
> >  about a configuration file path per line for /etc/conffiles/managed
> >  and /etc/conffiles/unmanaged, and /etc/conffiles/default contain a
> >  single word, which is "managed" by default; anything other than
> >  "unmanaged" is interpreted as "managed?).
> 
> Yep, that's exactly the way I was thinking of it.  Cool, I'm glad we're
> on the same wavelength here.  Having it in ucf will be a good first
> step.  In fact, ucf might be the logical place to keep this.

Let's please try to keep this kind of complication to an absolute
minimum, though. Packages should be encouraged to use as simple
mechanisms as possible for their configuration files, I feel: where
possible, dpkg-handled conffiles should be quite adequate for a large
number of cases.

I find that the minimalist approach of using as simple configuration
file technology as I can in my packages means that I don't try to
over-extend them to deal with things which are really better documented
well and left up to the admin. IMHO, this is a win.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]



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