Freddy Freeloader wrote:
And on an off topic note..... My main desktop started life as Woody, moved to Sarge, then to Etch, and has been running Sid for the last year. I also used apt-pinning to run a combination of Sarge, Etch and Sid for a while. This has happened while I've been learning Debian too so the poor machine has been abused a lot.
This brings up a lingering question I have been wondering about.I've been using Debian for ages. One of our servers actually used the old /etc/init.d/network script that had all of the "ifconfig" and "route" commands hard-coded into the script. I remember when they rolled out the "/etc/init.d/networking" script that used /etc/network/interfaces.
That's just one example of my getting things all set-up using a current Debian way, only to see some "newer, better" way come along. Over the years, there have been a lot of changes like this: switching from XF86 to xorg, changing from hotplug to udev, from insmod to modprobe, from deleting/renaming modules from /lib/modules to using blacklists, from whatever preceded yenta to yenta....
What this means for someone like myself is that not all of the parts of my Debian installation are doing things "the latest way". I'm sure that this causes the overall functioning of my system to be less-slick than it could be. One example is that I'm sure that the latest network-manager tools aren't going to make any sense of my network config until I switch to the new method of calling wpa-supplicant from within /etc/network/interfaces, rather than having ifplugd watch wpa-supplicant.
But that's a case where I *know* that I'm not using the current method. There are a few cases, however, where my system behaves strangely and I don't know why... but my suspicion is that it's due to some parts of my system doing things in the old way. For example, when I insert a DVD into my laptop, KDE puts an icon for the disc on the desktop... named after the DVD. If I eject the disc, the icon remains. If I put in another DVD, the icon remains with the *old* name (of the first DVD). Double-clicking on the icon opens the contents of the 2nd DVD, like you'd expect... but the name is of the 1st DVD until I reboot. Same thing goes for pluggable USB drives. Don't know why. But I *am* confident that, if I wiped my drive and reinstalled a brand-new, clean Debian install, I wouldn't have these wierd issues.
So, all this leads up to my question. Does anybody know of some website that keeps track of the latest way to have your machine configured? I'm not looking for something that just cat's all of the NEWS.Debian files from every package together. I'm talking about the major changes in how things should be configured. I'm talking about a list of statements like "Spawning a wpasupplicant daemon from the RC scripts is now discouraged. The new way is to spawn wpasupplicant instances from /etc/network/interfaces with 'wpa-*' options", or "For kernels 2.6 and higher, /etc/modutils is no longer used. /etc/modules.conf is used, but should not be edited directly. Create/edit files in /etc/modprobe.d and use update-modules to update modules.conf".
Is there something like that out there? - Joe
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