On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 12:49:57AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr> writes:
> > Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> >> If I were you, I'd document in README.Debian how the administrator can
> >> mount the images in /xen (or perhaps /srv/xen) and perhaps provide some
> >> configuration that makes it simple for the sysadmin to do so. For the
> >> FHS reasons, it shouldn't be the default (perhaps the admin is already
> >> using /xen for something completely different), but if the admin
> >> *chooses* to put them there, there's no reason why you can't make it
> >> easy.
>
> > Would you consider that asking for this path in Debconf would be a good
> > thing? That way I can ask if /xen should be used, right? (and maybe
> > default to /srv/xen as you suggested as it's better than
> > /a/way/too/far/in/the/tree)
>
> I think it depends on how likely you feel it is that the user of this
> package is going to want to customize the path.
>
> I think different people have different takes on this, but the way I look
> at Debconf questions is that they should be reserved for the stuff that
> essentially everyone installing the package is going to have to decide.
> They're intrusive when installing multiple systems, they require special
> handling for unattended installs, and it gets rather annoying to page
> through screens of them. Debian has generally reduced the number of
> Debconf questions one has to deal with in my experience, and I think
> that's a good thing. But if basically everyone using the package is going
> to need to make a decision, they're a good thing.
>
> I don't know the specifics of your package. The impression I got was that
> a default somewhere in /var would be fine, just a little annoying. To me,
> that doesn't quite meet the bar for a Debconf question, even at low
> priority. But it may be that directly accessing the images is way more
> common than the impression I got.
Agreed, IMHO such complex tasks should be made through a script of the
package, that the admin controls fully, rather than through apt where
it's hard to resume an upgrade.
Though, it's IMHO also possible to make the user configure the
package, and have a debconf question to ask the admin on upgrades if he
wants to run the upgrade script (once it's properly configured). IIRC
ikiwiki and its update_wikis or sth does that quite accurately.
and then, the xen partitions location would only have to be a setup in
a config file, that the admin choose to meet his choices and that the
dtc-xen-mass-upgrade script could use as a reference.
Remember (that's not aimed at Russ obviously ;p):
debconf is not a registry, it's a configuration helper. If the
configuration is very complex, debconf won't help you anyway, because
it's very likely that the admin will want a setupt slightly different
that what debconf allows him to chose anyway.
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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