On Tuesday 15 April 2014 03:35 AM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: [...] > When Plinth directly edits configuration files, it is an administrators' > tool. > > Solution is to have Plinth only ever communicate with debconf!
I can see that many uses cases for configuration can be done in this manner. However, I could not picture debconf fitting well in other cases. How are the following use cases likely to work? - Probing system status before setting configuration. For example, a script configuring firewall on the system needs to know how many and what kind of network interfaces are available on the system. Plinth needs to retrieve the status of the system and possibly present it to the user before setting the configuration. - Current state of the system is also required for monitoring and diagnostics. Is the firewall installed, configured and running? Plinth like most other administrator tools needs to show the current state of the system and not just the intended state of the system as stored in debconf answers. - Variable configuration. Plinth needs to connect to a wireless network. It might need to increase the number of questions to be asked in debconf when it sees that more wireless networks need to be configured. It appears that debconf questions need to be predefined in debian/templates. - Changing the running state the of the system and not its configuration. For example, Plinth needs to enable the panic mode in a firewall that is only applicable at runtime and changes are not permanent. - User management, permissions etc. I suppose this is outside the purview of debconf. Plinth does these. I apologize in advance if these are repeated questions as I am unaware of the previous discussions on the matter. If automatic upgrading of packages over stable releases is our primary concern would it not be easier to ship a configuration upgrade tool that respects the administrators configuration and interprets it in context of newer version of the software? The pagekite author wrote on such tool to handle automatic upgrade during major configuration change. Using utilities like augeus reduce the effort in writing such tools. Thank you, -- Sunil
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