[73] in athena10
Re: debathena-replace-conffiles idea
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Abbott)
Wed Jan 30 16:49:54 2008
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:47:29 -0500 (EST)
From: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <1201708535.5833.8.camel@error-messages.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0801301608190.3999@coset.mit.edu>
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On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, Greg Hudson wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 02:57 -0500, Tim Abbott wrote:
>> Notice that this interface would not support a single package diverting
>> two configuration files by the same name in different directories. I
>> think this is unlikely to be relevant for any real configuration package.
>
> I'm fine with this, but I'll suggest the workaround of substituting _
> for / in the config file name, so that the source and destination files
> look like:
>
> debian/conffile-copies/etc_ldap_ldap.conf
> debian/etc_ldap_ldap.conf.debathena
>
> Of course, that's not 100% clean either; two config files
> named /etc/ssh_config and /etc/ssh/config would conflict this way.
Because we use dh_install (which has the annoying property of not
letting you change the basename of a file when installing it), it's
desirable for the basename we generate to be the final basename.
Of course, I could make debathena-replace-conffiles do the install step as
well, so that we wouldn't need to manually add "ldap.conf.debathena" to
debathena-ldap-config.install -- this is probably a good idea regardless.
So we could deal with a different naming scheme.
Changing the naming scheme would also force a change in the name of the
generation script. I'd feel a bit cruel making people write scripts in
the debian directory called "transform_etc_ldap_ldap.conf.debathena" (I
think transform is more accurate than generate). Admitedly,
"transform_ldap.conf.debathena" is pretty bad too, but it's comparable to
"debathena-ldap-config.install". I guess I could check if
"transform_etc_ldap_ldap.conf.debathena" exists, and if it does, use it;
if it doesn't, fall back to "transform_ldap.conf.debathena". This has the
generality of one approach with the short filenames of the other, but has
extra complexity.
> I assume debian/conffile-copies is hand-updated in the sources right
> now?
No, it's currently automatically generated by debathena-check-conffiles,
copied in from the running machine at build time and verified to be
unmodified from the upstream Debian/Ubuntu by checking the md5sums. This
ensures that on each build platform we're always starting from an
unmodified configuration file from that platform.
-Tim Abbott
