Re: dotdee: a proposal for improving conffile management in Debian
Dustin Kirkland wrote:
> Would you be willing to join us via IRC and/or live internet audio
> stream for 1 hour next week, as we discuss this at the Ubuntu
> Developer Summit in Budapest?
No, not really. I wish I had time but email works much better for me.
> I am absolutely, keenly interested in seeing this solved for both
> Debian and Ubuntu. I'm willing and able to work on this myself, and
> I'm willing and able to delegate the work to capable members on my
> team. I'd like to hold off on both of those until we have an agreed
> upon design
Ah, then we have different philosophies. I like to see people
experimenting with future changes for dpkg, which involves
* people playing around with their private copies of dpkg;
* submitting experiments when they look good, with full
knowledge that if something better comes around then their code
might not be used;
* public development and public review of work to make it easier to
see how to get started and avoid duplication of effort.
Which is not to say that early thoughts about a design are a bad
thing, just that commiting to a design before there's code seems like
a bad idea.
FWIW my reactions to the dotdee concept were similar to Guillem's. On
the other hand the idea of hooks to support a custom strategy for
updating conffiles seems appealing to me. Saving pristine conffiles
to some fixed place (à la Sean's conffiledb) would probably work
better than the filename mapping idea I mentioned. All this is to
say, you chose an interesting topic and I'd be very happy if you move
it forward, even if your goal is this dotdee thing I'm not convinced
about. :)
Hope that helps,
Jonathan
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