Re: Package configuration philosophy
>>>>> "Joey" == Joey Hess <joey@kite.ml.org> writes:
Joey> So when I installed debian, I was pleasantly suprised to
Joey> find all these packages prompting me for configuration
Joey> information in their postinst scripts, and I ended up with a
Joey> working system with all the necessary daemons configured
Joey> much faster than I expected.
Joey> I do notice that all the counterexamples I gave are for
Joey> daemons, not the interactive programs like X and fvwm that a
Joey> new user is going to be faced with. You you may well be
Joey> right about debian catering to the more technical crowd. But
Joey> with new additions like the debian menu system and so on, I
Joey> see debian stating to provide easier configuration for the
Joey> interactive stuff as well.
X windows customizations and prompt settings are much easier things
for a newbie to learn to do than sendmail configuration, magicfilter
and printcap setup, networking, ppp, diald, ... the list goes on, I
can only imagine.
It doesn't take as much expertise and knowledge to make the simple
customizations as it does to configure all that other stuff about
thingies that DOS never heard of.
If things are not explicitly mentioned, a neophite may never discover
them.
The main thing would be to make the documantation easily accessable
with a pointer to it's location, and a suggested reading order. "Where
do I begin? What should I read? What exists?"
Dwww provides a good way to get started reading; but how did I get
dwww up and running if I need newbie documantation? Many will need to
be bootstrapped.
----
I've found that Midnight Commander is a wonderful tool for browsing
/usr/doc, and I think it's really cool how it formats man pages and
.html documents. It can see inside .deb packages too! Nifty. It
compliments dselect fairly well.
I really like the way the fvwm2 configuration is done, with the
multiple files and hooks. I learned a lot from that. It will be
interesting to see how a configuration GUI program can create menu
files and suchlike. Will it use m4? I want to learn that.
And I like the tip-of-the-login idea; It could use a 'fortunes'
database, and maybe xmessage, sysnews, or motd???
Karl M. Hegbloom <karlheg@inetarena.com>
http://www.inetarena.com/~karlheg
Debian GNU 1.2 Linux 2.0.29t
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