Re: why no linuxconf package?
Noah L. Meyerhans writes:
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>
> On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Russell Nelson wrote:
>
> > Linuxconf uses the GPL. Is there some non-technical reason why there
> > is no Debian package for Linuxconf? (I just have this idea that
> > Debian suffers from NIH -- dare I say "RPM"?)
>
> Apparently linuxconf is included with potato (debian 2.2, which is in
> development). IMHO this is really not a good thing, because linuxconf has
> a nasty tendancy to create scripts that are easily machine parsable but
> are absolutely unreadable to humans. One of Debians greatest assets is
> its remote, console based admin capability. To me, linuxconf really
> breaks this.
If it breaks this, then linuxconf needs fixing. But that's more a
matter of fixing linuxconf than rejecting it. It's okay if a GUI
admin tool writes out structured configuration files, but it MUST be
able to read in any modifications made by hand, and it SHOULD write
configuration files which are human-readable.
> I don't think it's fair at all to say that Debian suffers from the NIH
> syndrome. Did we write sendmail, apache, emacs, or perl? RedHat didn't
> write linuxconf (in fact, linuxconf is incompatible with redhat's own
> "AnotherLevel" config tool (I think that's the right name)). So it's not
> like we've got a problem with stuff written by people doing work for other
> distributions. And there are fundamental reasons why we use something
> other than RPM. The Debian package format is inherently better.
RPM has already been broken^H^H^H^H^H^Himproved once already. I don't
see why it can't be improved to include any advantages that DEB has.
I mean, in an era when XEmacs and GNU Emacs are talking about merging
back, and egcs is becoming gcc-3.0, can't we all get along?
> This has been debated by the developers quite often. Somebody else
> can probably give you a more detailed history of this issue.
I already asked, and didn't get one. But Colin Marquardt pointed me
to http://kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/ , which is better than nothing.
--
-russ nelson <nelson@crynwr.com> http://russnelson.com
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