Hi, i've just subscribed to -policy but I read some mails in the archive about configuration management. The configuration management thread has started with the need of a non-interactive installation process, I believe.
We are now talking about a big registry containing the informations needed for the installation. I think we have jumped over a step : the configuration is managed in the postinst script. But most package does not clearly separate post-installation from configuration. And this difference should really exist. If I want to install a package but not to configure it, I generally can't. To understand that, I must explain what configuration means for me : configuration is all the job that is needed in order that the program will do what he is intented to, this includes all calls to update-rc.d, all calls to update-inetd and all interactive questions... A package that is not configured should not be run at startup and should not "work" in a standalone way (if the user execute it from a shell that's ok). And to explain better the difference beetween post-installation and configuration, here's an example : I maintain a package for a mailing-list manager, and here's what's the post-installation : - create a dedicated user/group for the ML manager - chown/chgrp all files to this new user/group - create some symlinks (optionnal) And the configuration would be : - create the aliases for the bot - create a syslog.conf entry via syslog-facility (my program use syslog LOCALx facilities for his logs) - call update-rc.d for launching at boot (- start it right now) That's why I think that policy should ask developers to pay special attention to what's belong to post-installation and what's the configuration. And this will allow for installing without configuring. My intent was to try to install packages non-interactively and to copy a /etc directory from a model machine. (think to people without a local network that can't just do an rdist). This should work if all config files are *really* stored in /etc... after that the only problem is that packages remain unconfigured for dpkg even if they aren't. I know that this method will probably not work because there will be numerous problem but I think, it should work and we need to progress in that direction so that in a future day it will be possible... I hope that my explications are clear enough so that some people may be able to understand me. :) And last but not least, this does really not conflict with the idea of a registry for installations informations but makes it easier to know when configuration happens and what it should do. Cheers, -- Hertzog Raphaël ¤ 0C4CABF1 ¤ http://www.mygale.org/~hra/
