Packaging of a Web viewer of medical images

[Sébastien Jodogne <s.jodogne@chu.ulg.ac.be>]

Dear Debian Med community,

The Orthanc project has just released a free and open-source Web viewer of medical images that integrates smoothly as a plugin to Orthanc [1]. The Web viewer is based upon Chris Hafey's Cornerstone [2] and Mathieu Malaterre's GDCM [3]. I feel that this plugin might ease the access to medical images.

I have therefore started to work on a Debian package for this Web viewer, nicknamed "orthanc-webviewer". Please note that I am currently unable to formally file an ITP because of a transient problem with reportbug [4].

This "orthanc-webviewer" package will have to modify the JSON configuration file "/etc/orthanc/orthanc.json" from the "orthanc" package, by adding options that are only related to the Web viewer. However, the system administrator might have applied local modifications to the original "/etc/orthanc/orthanc.json" in between.

My question is the following: What is the recommended way of "patching" a configuration file, given that this file might be affected by local changes?

Thanks in advance,
Sébastien-


[1] https://code.google.com/p/orthanc-webviewer/
[2] https://github.com/chafey/cornerstone
[3] http://sourceforge.net/projects/gdcm/
[4] http://www.eenyhelp.com/bug-779103-reportbug-fails-when-you-try-file-bug-wnpp-pseudo-package-help-215591170.html