I've taken over maintenance of the 'addressbook' package. I need some advice, not so much on the technical side, but rather the "whats the right way to interpret policy" issue.
First off, there's a global config file /usr/lib/addressbook/addressbook.config which clearly needs to be moved into /etc/ and marked as a config file. That's easy. I'm thinking about preserving this file (doing a check/copy in preinst) if it's not the stock distributed version (i.e., it's been edited). Am I being too clever by half? To check it, is 'cmp' sufficient? Speaking of global config, the currently shipping config isn't all that reasonable. Its default mail command is 'xterm -e pine <addr>'. Should I change that to 'mutt' and add a suggests in the package? Is there a better default mailer for Debian? It also uses support programs for faxing (makefax), dialing (chat), printing (latex(!) and mpage(!)), viewing URLs (netscape). Ho boy. I think actually I'm going to have to do what James Troup just did for 'gpm': keep addressbook.config out of conffiles but generate it out of some sort of script. Time to start hacking on 'addressbookconfig' ? Next, there's a "global" addressbook in /usr/lib/addressbook also. Most people don't actually use the global addressbook (although it's the default addressbook currently). However, I could see that it might be useful to have such a file. Should I also put that in /etc (i.e., /etc/addressbook) and mark it as a config file? By default this directory hold some symlinks to documentation files (in /usr/doc/addressbook, of course). This seems non-standard. Should I remove these symlinks? Lastly, and most interesting I guess, is the lockfile issue. I'm looking into using the undocumented 'liblockfile' package, specifically, the lockfile_create() and lockfile_remove() calls. However, I'm not sure that it's really necessary. There's an outstanding bug (#13479) about this, but that's more relevant to stale lockfiles sticking around i.e., if X is suddenly shutdown. I don't know if I should move to liblockfile or just fix the problem w/ stale lockfiles and test on NFS. I'm asking since I'm not really convinced it makes sense to use stdized locking in this case since only addressbook would be reading the files (no other packages), and it will take a bit of work (i.e., getting tcl/tk to use the C shared lib). .....A. P. [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
