Re: jessie release goals
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Paul Wise wrote:
>> Probably the rsync package should just ask you via debconf if you want
>> to serve any directories and what their names and paths should be.
>> Since most folks who have rsync installed don't need rsyncd, the
>> default would be to not setup anything.
> No, it should not. 60 packages depend on rsync.
> Installing a package like git should not require batting away debconf
> prompts about unusual configurations that, if something is typed into
> them, can expose the system to security holes.
+1
Debconf should be used in cases where a substantial percentage of the
people installing the package are going to want the thing Debconf is
prompting about. If the vast majority of users aren't going to care about
that functionality at all, either the package should be split (generally
the best move) or the unusual configuration should be documented elsewhere
(like README.Debian) and possibly automated with an external configuration
tool.
The cvs package went down the debconf path, and it never failed to annoy
me. When I installed the cvs package to get the cvs command-line client
to access remote CVS repositories, it asked me where I wanted to create a
directory to host CVS repositories. I bet fewer than 1% of the people
installing cvs wanted to do anything of the sort.
For the specific case of rsync, I think we should just make rsync and
rsyncd (or rsync-server) packages and be done with it. Yes, small
packages are to be avoided in general, but when the packages are used by
people with very different needs and one of them wants to add init scripts
to launch a daemon, to me that's a good reason for a package split. I've
been mildly annoyed for years at all the systems I have that have a
completely useless rsync init script installed that runs with every boot.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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