Re: Re-debconfage
On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 12:18:19AM -0500, David Nusinow wrote:
> I'm going
> to try and look in to what other distros do to configure X to see where
> we're going. If anyone wants to contribute to that, feel free. The basic
> idea being that if we can steal some autoconfiguration code it'll save
> us plenty of time and effort.
Ok, here's the list that I've come up with so far:
Debian Derivatives
------------------
Knoppix: xf86config-knoppix and ddcxinfo-knoppix. The former is a script that
builds the config file, and the latter queries the hardware for
monitor modes. There is also a hwsetup-knoppix component, which
is based off of kudzu. This component loads modules, generates
/dev links, and basically provides the data that discover
handles in the current debian configuration scripts.
MEPIS: ? (I had a hard time finding the MEPIS sources)
Morphix: xconf, a port of redhat-config-xfree. This lacks debconf
support and uses the gtk.
Skolelinux: xdebconfigurator. A custom set of scripts that uses a ton of
different tools, including kudzu, hwinfo, discover,
SuperProbe, detect, hwdata, and dexconf.
Non-Debian Distros
------------------
Gentoo: Do what you want (xf86config and X -configure are mentioned in
the docs). No good for our purposes.
Fedora: Very likely a combination of kudzu and the redhat-config-xfree
that Morphix uses.
Mandrake: DrakX, a custom app in a suite of tools from Mandrake. This is
feasible, but not necessarily an easy port to Debian.
Apparently relies on ldetect, a lightweight library for
hardware detection, although I'm not sure about this.
Slackware: Do what you want. Provides a base config file and lets the
user edit as they wish. No good for our purposes.
Suse: ?
My current thinking is to go with knoppix, for a variety of reasons. One is
that it's already well proven in the field, and a ton of users have been asking
for Debian to use the knoppix tools directly, so that's a good thing.
Architecturally, the scripts are simple and direct, without trying to do too
much. They rely on the kudzu library at some point, which is a problem, but I
could rewrite that app so that it was able to use discover instead, although I
don't really see a benefit in that right now.
Another huge benefit is that this won't require a major rewrite, so it'll
save time and energy, as well as decreasing the number of bugs that'll pop up.
Also, and this is key, using the knoppix scripts would allow us to simply
dump debconfage all together in the X packages, which would save us a ton of
pain. The config file would simply be another conffile and there wouldn't
really be any more hassle about it until XFree decides they need to change the
file format again.
Ultimately, the way I see this working is to patch discover to accept
a commandline argument to output info to a file in the format that the
knoppix scripts expect. We also have the xserver-xfree86 package depend
on ddcxinfo, which would have to be put in to Debian proper (I'm happy
to do this, and put it under maintainership of the XSF). The xserver
package would also depend on discover, and use the knoppix xf86config
inside of the xserver package to write the default config. No debconf
questions need be asked, no crappy subpar parser needs to be written.
And it saves me a ton of time.
- David Nusinow
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