[gentoo-dev] Package configuration

[Geert Bevin <gbevin@theleaf.be>]

Hello,

I've been playing a bit with portage and try to create a stable and easy
to use postgres package. Doing this I noticed something missing in
portage (maybe I'm just overlooking it, and then all what follows is
obsolete ;-) ).

Typically a package has a configuration phase which occurs after merging
it into the system. This configuration is optional, but could be done
both for binary as source packages. For postgres this is for example the
initialization and installation of an empty database instance. Rocklinux
solves this in a very simple and easy to use manner. It contains an
/etc/setup.d/ directory with simple shell scripts prepended by numbers
in their names (eg. 00-general, 10-gpm, 20-network, 50-sshd, 70-pgsql,
...) It uses these numbers to execute all configs sequentially when a
binary clean install is done from cd. This makes the initial
configuration process modular and very manageable.

When installing a package, emerge could monitor /etc/setup.d/ in a
similar way as it monitors /etc and report whether a new config file is
present and that it can be executed to configure the package that just
was merged.

I hope I explained clearly enough. Tell me what you think of it.

Best regards,

-- 
Geert Bevin
the Leaf sprl/bvba
"Use what you need"           Pierre Theunisstraat 1/47
http://www.theleaf.be         1030 Brussels
gbevin@theleaf.be             Tel & Fax +32 2 241 19 98