On Wed, Jul 07, 1999 at 08:03:19AM +0000, Norbert Nemec wrote:
> I do not talk about where packages should get their configuration
> information from, I did talk about what they do, if they do not have the
> information necessary. (And even with he perfect autoconfig system, there
> will be stuations when the packages lack some information they need to
> configure completely)
>
> IMO, packages should under no circumstances complain
> about anything if it is avoidable at all.
One of the key attractions of Debian for me is that every (well, nearly)
package is adequately configured whenever it's installed. If I want to
use any given program, all I need to do is run apt-get and answer the
postinst questions. I don't have to go looking in /usr/doc, I don't
have to poke through /etc, I don't have to run some weird scripts from
/usr/lib/somewhere. I don't have to think.
I like this, and I think it's a wonderful feature of the Debian package
system. What you propose seems to remove this possibility.
As an example, what would happen to netbase's postinst questions and
comments? It currently warns about stopping the portmapper (and thus
possibly doing horrible things to any rpc processes, such as NFS), it
asks if you want to add some IPv6 entries to /etc/hostsc (which could
possibly do bad things to programs not coping with ipv6 addressing, but
doesn't seem to), and if you want ipfwadm to make calls to ipchains under
kernel 2.2 or not.
There are reasonable defaults for all these things, and they can all
be fixed after install. But it seems to me that the possibility of
having your system suddenly get trashed for no apparent reason makes
the nagging worthwhile.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``There's nothing worse than people with a clue.
They're always disagreeing with you.''
-- Andrew Over
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