Re: Directoryfulls of configuration files
On 29 Apr 2002, Thomas Hood wrote:
> configuration directories. It would be good if there were
> consistency among these utilities in the filename patterns
> ignored. I suggest that we adopt the standard that such
> filenames consist only of lower case letters, numerals,
> underscores, hyphens and plus signs. (That is, a legal package
> name, but no dots allowed.)
[existing varying examples snipped]
> Were we to implement this, we would have to go through a
> phase where any non-compliant configuration file names were
> changed. Then the utilities could be modified to bring
> them into compliance.
>
> Or is this a bad idea?
I think it's a pretty good idea. What would be nicest is if there was a
debhelper-like set of scripts to process these sorts of things. For
instance, run-parts serves this rather well at present for anything where
everything in a directory needs to be run. If we identify what other forms
of this sort of thing might exist (multi-part config files, for instance,
for apt and logcheck (amongst others)) and write scripts to do it, then
package maintainers (and upstream authors, preferably) can use these scripts
to make a package-independent (and hence system-consistent) way of handling
these issues.
OK, so run-parts exists (as part of debianutils) so we need a, say,
read-parts? What would be it's output? A concatentation of all it's input
files, in order? Not necessarily what some programs might desire. We
might need several different programs - cat-parts, list-parts (provides a
list of files to use, in order of preference) or others. If everything used
those scripts instead of whatever they might currently be doing, the BCP of
Debian could be instilled in those scripts instead of in every package that
might wish to provide such functionality.
What do people think?
--
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#include <disclaimer.h>
Matthew Palmer
mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au
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