Hello! Here are some wishes and new ideas I've piled up in last days:
Many people periodically upgrade their systems using apt as I do. One thing I would like to have is a log file showing what changed on my system after each apt-get run, extracting the relative portions of the changelogs of the updated packages and grouping them together. Another nice things that could be added to apt are the ability to upgrade only those pachages who shifted only by upstream release, so to limit the download charge; the best thing would be to keep old .deb's and download just patches to them, but I feel this would complicate things a lot. Changing of scope, an ambitious idea I had was to extend the concept of themes to the global system configuration. I noticed that themes are used whenever an applications supports a configuration system both powerful, comprehensive and full of options, and that Linux servers and applications are exactly that. I wondered if it could be possible to make some "webserver" or "graphic workstation" theme that could be installed on a Linux box and provide appropriate configuration for most packages to specific needs. As of now, if one manages to fine tune his box for some specific purpose, it is unpratical to make its work available to people interested in the same purpose. The whole Linux concept provides an unmatched set of extremely powerful, full-featured and versatile applications, and there must be a way to bind them to do a specific job without working on a number of different configuration files each time. Something similar is already achieved in a very simple way by scripts like eximconfig, but it could be extended to a coherent framework to support for more cases. Think of a web server: you can have a web server in hour home Linux box, a little intranet web server, a big virtual hosting web server, each that could choose whether or not to provide, for example, suid cgi, ssi, php3, accounting and squid caching. Why can't we have a "web server" "theme" or "configurator" that can cope with this set of options and provide and entry-level configuration for apache, cgiwrap, php and whatever needs it, so that the sysadmin needs only to tune it up (add the server name and very site-specific features) and not to redo all the work from scratch? I think it's time to think about something that could do to configuration files what dpkg does to the file system. Bye, Enrico -- PGP key available on finger -l [EMAIL PROTECTED]
