Re: debconf as a registry
Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> writes:
> Certainly. You seem to have misunderstood my intention. I don't mean
> to say we should force packages to use a standard package.config. That
> file should be used to do all the things it must do. What I'm proposing
> is to make it easy for packages with simple file formats (the majority
> of cases) to do what they should to: read their config and using it as
> defaults.
Hm, I think the idea of a format-aware configuration editor (similar to
Config::Model::Edit, actually) that's aware of Debconf mappings for
parameters would be extremely useful. That would be something I would
love to use in maintainer scripts.
(And another good reason to write maintainer scripts in a better language,
such as Perl, which sadly isn't that well-supported right now.)
> Being responsible is not the same as doing it alone. In this case, help
> would be useful. And due to the limits of when it is run, there aren't
> many places it can come from (either an Essential:yes package or
> debconf).
That's a good point, and definitely one of the things that makes using,
say, Config::Model::Edit for this purpose rather tricky.
> But while the debhelper-addon-trick seems ugly to me, it does have
> several advantages:
> - It is nonintrusive; only packages which want to use it do.
> - It works; the config files will contain copies of the required code.
> - There is no code duplication in the source packages. (Lots of it in
> the binary packages, of course; this is like using a static library.)
> It's the best solution I can currently think of. Would you agree that
> this would be useful?
Yes.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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