Anders Kaseorg and I created a system of CDBS modules (which we've
tentatively packaged as the config-package-dev package) for creating
Debian configuration packages.


I'm designing a hosting service at Penn State which involves
configuring a big pile of Debian machines (https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/wiki/WebLionHosting
). I was midway through inventing/accumulating something very similar
when I discovered your framework, and I now plan to use it for almost
all our config packages. Bravo!


Please count my vote toward polishing dpkg's divert behavior, adding
config hooks, or whatever the best solution turns out to be for
officially supporting config packages. This is too useful a feature to
leave teetering on the edge of acceptance!


Erik Rose
Core Developer and General Incorrigible
The WebLion Group
Pennsylvania State University


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(oh, hey, look at that, someone drawing my attention back to this thread
that I meant to follow up to.)

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 10:43:55AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> > On lun, 2008-02-25 at 10:23 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:

> >> ucf, from its DESCRIPTION in its man page, seems to handle the case of
> >> shipping a configuration file upstream that may also be locally
> >> modified, but I don't see where it handles merging in the results of
> >> debconf prompting. Am I just missing something?

> > ucf can easily be fed with the debconf-generated file. When told to with
> > the proper option, it will even do a three-way merge of the proposed
> > (maintainer + debconf) changes to the locally modified file.

> Oh! Okay, that was the piece that I was missing. That's a better
> solution than what I have now.

> Thanks, I'll try to find time to look at this in the not-too-distant
> future.

I humbly offer up samba-common in unstable as an example of a package that
DTRT with ucf to manage a config file.

I wish the three-way merge support in ucf was better, but for all that, the
status quo is still pretty darn slick.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org


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On 11-Apr-08, 16:07 (CDT), Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> I humbly offer up samba-common in unstable as an example of a package that
> DTRT with ucf to manage a config file.

Is it just me, or does everyone get prompted twice about smb.conf on
samba/samba-common upgrades? (I've looked through the various install
and config scripts, but not closely enough to figure out why...)

Steve

--
Steve Greenland
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
world. -- seen on the net


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On Sat April 12 2008 10:48:01 Steve Greenland wrote:
> Is it just me, or does everyone get prompted twice about smb.conf on
> samba/samba-common upgrades? (I've looked through the various install
> and config scripts, but not closely enough to figure out why...)

It happened here too. I haven't figured out why.

--Mike Bird


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On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 12:48:01PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> On 11-Apr-08, 16:07 (CDT), Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> > I humbly offer up samba-common in unstable as an example of a package that
> > DTRT with ucf to manage a config file.

> Is it just me, or does everyone get prompted twice about smb.conf on
> samba/samba-common upgrades? (I've looked through the various install
> and config scripts, but not closely enough to figure out why...)

On your first upgrade to the ucf-based samba-common, you may get two prompts
- first to reconcile the differences with your smb.conf which doesn't match
the known old template, and then to merge in the smb.conf from the current
package.

There's room for improvement on the first pass by doing a better job of
matching up the user's config with past smb.conf templates (which mostly
means doing some scary package archaeology), but the history of this config
file spans more than a decade, so there will definitely be users for whom we
can't help but prompt twice on the first upgrade.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org


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