Re: Configuration management, revision 3

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> Does this help at all?

Yes, I understand where you're coming from.

> You just found the first genuine bug in my idea.  Congratulations.  It
> is not fatal, however.  Here is one way of fixing it.  If you need to
> have one set of questions or another set if questions, based on the
> current status of the system (and not on the user's answers to other
> questions), you can probe this in a script that is run before the data
> is sent to the configuration frontend.  The script then sends one set
> of data if the probe returned foo, and another set of data if the
> probe returned bar.

You don't mean to have the script output the actual structure that contains
the questions, do you? That has problems.. If you meant the questions are
instorduced by some other means and the script just indicates which set need
answering, that works.


Anyhow, here's another problem I'm worried about. Say the configuration
needs to calculate values for the user. For example, suppose this is setting
up networking on the machine. The user needs to be asked some things, like

hostname
fqdn
ip address
dns server ip address
netmask
network address
broadcast address
default gateway

But some of these values are interrelated. For example, given the fqdn, you 
can almost always calculate the hostname - but not always - users may want 
strange setups. For example, my system's hostname is kite, but its fqdn is
kitenet.net.

With a script that can ask questions in sequence, it can ask for the fqdn,
guess at the hostname and ask for the hostname, presenting its guess as the
default. Then it can ask the other questions. How would your proposal handle
this?

Moving along through this example, we get to another problem in your
proposal - no way to do complex data validation. We want to prompt the user
for things like their ip address, netmask, etc. And then validate that all
the ip addresses they've presented actually work together. If not, display
an error and let them correct it. Again, a script that asks a series of
questions can easily do this. Your proposal cannot.

-- 
see shy jo


--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org