RE: Package configuration philosophy
On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, Kevin McEnhill wrote:
> Yoav wrote:
>
> #ifdef QUOTE --------------------------------------------
>
> It seems that Debian is taking a rather different philosophy on
> pre-configured packages than other distributions, such as RedHat. What I
>
> <snip a comparison of different packaging set-ups>
>
> It seems as if Debian is catering to the more techie crowd - the ones
> that want a bare-bones system they can play around with and not have
> someone else make decisions and choices for them. Sort of like after
> installing Solaris - the system is stripped to the bones by way of
> configuration - you have to set it all up by yourself.
>
> My proposition - let's go for the more casual, yet sophisticated user.
> A user that DOES want to read the Fvwm man page to learn how to set it
> up to his own tastes, BUT doesn't want to do it 2 hours after installing
> the system and in the meantime he would like a nice default to help him
> get along.
>
> #endif -------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Well, I see your point about Debian leaving you with the "So, now what?"
> feeling after an installation, but I think that is an advantage. Yes it
> does cater to the technical crowd but, it isn't that technical and you end
> up learning something about your system while you try to customize it. I am
> in the process of trying to set up color ls in my xterms. On other systems,
Although this might be okay the first time around, if you want to use
Debian on a mass installation on multiple systems, or you simply want to
setup a friend's system, writing all the scripts can be somewhat of a pain
for each install and using dselect for each machine can also be annoying.
> it might be included and I would have never learned about my .bashrc,
> .profile, .xresource, and xrdb. In trying to do a simple customization, I
> have been learning about my system.
But for practical installations even the "techie" type would appreciate a
dumb non-interactive install if one has to do it for a lot of machines. It
wouldn't be hard to make another debian package that would install
standardized scripts, such as a profile and a skeleton. The packages,
however, tend to install their own defaults, (such as X). So I fail to see
a need for a "standerdizaton" of anything beyond some base scripts. Again,
this should be a no brainer and if anyone wants to do it, they can
write/commandeer a couple of startup scripts and package them as a .deb
file. It would be nice if dpkg could be automated to install a
standardized
setup from the get go. I suppose that this can be another script, written
in bash or perl that reads from a config file. Or one could always port
the dselect file(s)....
Will
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com
Reply to: