Wishes and ideas...
Hello!
Here are some wishes and new ideas I've piled up in last days:
Many people periodically upgrade their systems using apt as I do. One thing I
would like to have is a log file showing what changed on my system after each
apt-get run, extracting the relative portions of the changelogs of the updated
packages and grouping them together.
Another nice things that could be added to apt are the ability to upgrade only
those pachages who shifted only by upstream release, so to limit the download
charge; the best thing would be to keep old .deb's and download just patches to
them, but I feel this would complicate things a lot.
Changing of scope, an ambitious idea I had was to extend the concept of themes
to the global system configuration. I noticed that themes are used whenever an
applications supports a configuration system both powerful, comprehensive and
full of options, and that Linux servers and applications are exactly that.
I wondered if it could be possible to make some "webserver" or "graphic
workstation" theme that could be installed on a Linux box and provide
appropriate configuration for most packages to specific needs. As of now, if
one manages to fine tune his box for some specific purpose, it is unpratical to
make its work available to people interested in the same purpose.
The whole Linux concept provides an unmatched set of extremely powerful,
full-featured and versatile applications, and there must be a way to bind them
to do a specific job without working on a number of different configuration
files each time. Something similar is already achieved in a very simple way
by scripts like eximconfig, but it could be extended to a coherent framework to
support for more cases.
Think of a web server: you can have a web server in hour home Linux box, a
little intranet web server, a big virtual hosting web server, each that could
choose whether or not to provide, for example, suid cgi, ssi, php3, accounting
and squid caching. Why can't we have a "web server" "theme" or "configurator"
that can cope with this set of options and provide and entry-level
configuration for apache, cgiwrap, php and whatever needs it, so that the
sysadmin needs only to tune it up (add the server name and very site-specific
features) and not to redo all the work from scratch?
I think it's time to think about something that could do to configuration files
what dpkg does to the file system.
Bye, Enrico
--
PGP key available on finger -l zinie@cs.unibo.it
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