Re: Proposal to improve package configuration upgrades

[Dominique Dumont <dominique.dumont@hp.com>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:

>  Do we have an idea of how many configuration files can be
>  described in terms of such a model? 

I do not know how many. I'd say most of the files that do not use
variables. For instance exim config is out. I do not know for Apache
config files. 

So far, I've created models for OpenSsh [1] (quite easy) and Xorg [2]
(more challenging and the model is still not complete)

You will be able to try yourself OpenSsh editor as soon as
libconfig-model-openssh-perl is accepted by ftp-masters.

>  (I generally tend to code configuration files in a scripting
>  language if the code is written in a scripting language).

Uh ?

>         While I suspect a large number of our configuration files are
>  simple, I fear that a significan chunk of them are fairly complex; and
>  possibly not amenable to being described in terms of a non-trivial
>  model. 

Agreed. We may need to use hybrid solution for the most complex
configuration files. Something like exim-like template + Config::Model
for the template variables.

All the best

[1] http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/DDUMONT/Config-Model-OpenSsh-1.203/lib/Config/Model/models/
[2] http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/DDUMONT/Config-Model-Xorg-0.513/lib/Config/Model/models/

-- 
Dominique Dumont 
"Delivering successful solutions requires giving people what they
need, not what they want." Kurt Bittner

irc:
  domidumont at irc.freenode.net
  ddumont at irc.debian.org