Re: Debian, too easy?

[Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>]

Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 09:59:54PM +1000, Russell wrote:
>> IMHO, a registry would be ok if it was ascii/human readable, you could
>> tell applications to ignore it, and no applications are forced or required
>> to know about it. A set of utilities for examining and manipulating it
>> would be useful too.
>
> Don't we already have a registry?  Isn't it called /etc?  Isn't a lot
> easier to deal with it spread out a little for better description?

I think the idea would be to make it easier to use software (like
debconf) to modify configuration data without overwriting the user's
changes.  Right now, unless a configuration file is trivially easy to
parse, it's nearly impossible to use debconf to modify a file.  The
result is a file like XF86Config-4 containing something like:

### DO NOT MODIFY STUFF BELOW THIS LINE

which is think everyone agree is not an optimal solution.

-- 
People said I was dumb, but I proved them!