Re: [Internal] Re: Infrastructure for meta-distribution projects

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote:

>   [Going on with the mass-CC]
Stopping mass-CC and stay on debian-devel (while I would prefer debian-subprojects
but the request for this list was closed
           http://bugs.debian.org/160229)

>  This is cool. And how about adding some way to also being able to put
>  in those metapackages configurations for those packages being
>  installed?
I have not just done this but I will have to change postgresql configuration
when installing gnumed-server package.  How this can be done is demonstrated
by gforge package (search the archive of debian-devel in last month)

I would go with the following principle:

  - provide a file
      /etc/<package-to-be-changed>.conf.<meta-package-name>
    or similiar name / location
  - ask via debconf whether the configuration of <package-to-be-changed>
    can be changed.
    (some options like
        "raw override" - dangerous and not suggested
        "try a diff"   - probably default
        "how to do it manually" - perhaps even better default
     might be usefull here)
  - do the necessary stuff in postinst (while leaving a copy of the
    old config)

Note that this only a raw sketch and I would love to hear opinions.

Kind regards

        Andreas.