Re: Conffiles and possible conffiles
"cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)" <cobaco@linux.be> wrote:
> So you can for example have 4 config sets (each in its own location):
> - one with the upstream default values
> - one with overrides for upstream settings by maintainer
> - one with cdd-overrides for the settings
> - one with admin-overrides for the settings
>
> Each party can then change his settings independently of the others,
> overriding (only) the defaults they care about.
This is essentially the same in a TeX system - the number of config sets
is theoretically unlimited.
>> It would be nice to notify the user about changes in the default
>> config and give the choice of a diff or 3 way merge. Maybe this is
>> something that could be added to ucf (e.g. option
>> --modified-file=/etc/texmf/foo) and then present the user with the
>> same options and frontend as with normal config files.
>
> If (as is the case for KDE, Gnome and XFCE) the granularity when combinying
> the different configuration settings is per config-key and not config-file
> any merge problems basically disappear: you just make sure you set the
> search path to reflect the precedence among the various configuration sets,
> any changes made by a party whose configuration settings have lower
> precedence are then used transparently unless you've overriden that
> specific setting.
This is different in a TeX system: There is only one major
configuration file, texmf.cnf, for which per-setting overrides work. In
all other cases only one file is read; and in most of these cases this
cannot be changed, because the files are simply TeX input files, and we
cannot change TeX's behavior wrt to reading files.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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