advise wanted on addressbook package
I've taken over maintenance of the 'addressbook' package. I need some
advice, not so much on the technical side, but rather the "whats the
right way to interpret policy" issue.
First off, there's a global config file /usr/lib/addressbook/addressbook.config
which clearly needs to be moved into /etc/ and marked as a config file.
That's easy. I'm thinking about preserving this file (doing a check/copy
in preinst) if it's not the stock distributed version (i.e., it's been
edited). Am I being too clever by half? To check it, is 'cmp'
sufficient?
Speaking of global config, the currently shipping config isn't all that
reasonable. Its default mail command is 'xterm -e pine <addr>'. Should
I change that to 'mutt' and add a suggests in the package? Is there a
better default mailer for Debian? It also uses support programs for
faxing (makefax), dialing (chat), printing (latex(!) and mpage(!)),
viewing URLs (netscape).
Ho boy. I think actually I'm going to have to do what James Troup just
did for 'gpm': keep addressbook.config out of conffiles but generate it
out of some sort of script. Time to start hacking on
'addressbookconfig' ?
Next, there's a "global" addressbook in /usr/lib/addressbook also. Most
people don't actually use the global addressbook (although it's the
default addressbook currently). However, I could see that it might be
useful to have such a file. Should I also put that in /etc (i.e.,
/etc/addressbook) and mark it as a config file?
By default this directory hold some symlinks to documentation files (in
/usr/doc/addressbook, of course). This seems non-standard. Should I remove
these symlinks?
Lastly, and most interesting I guess, is the lockfile issue. I'm looking
into using the undocumented 'liblockfile' package, specifically, the
lockfile_create() and lockfile_remove() calls. However, I'm not sure
that it's really necessary. There's an outstanding bug (#13479) about
this, but that's more relevant to stale lockfiles sticking around i.e.,
if X is suddenly shutdown. I don't know if I should move to liblockfile
or just fix the problem w/ stale lockfiles and test on NFS. I'm asking
since I'm not really convinced it makes sense to use stdized locking in
this case since only addressbook would be reading the files (no other
packages), and it will take a bit of work (i.e., getting tcl/tk to use
the C shared lib).
.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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