Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Tom

[Thomas Flavel <thomasfl@cogs.susx.ac.uk>]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 02:03:01PM +0100, Achim Gottinger wrote:
> > >
> > > > From what I can see it has a binary cd version, with the option
> > > > to compile from source (the same thing I was talking about, if I understand them
> > > > correctly). It describes it's package management as closer to FreeBSD than debian.
> > > > It looks to be quite similar to gentoo to me, although not quite as advanced.
> > >
> > > I took a look at the site and think that we need something similar to cfengine
> > > sometimes.
> >
> > That looks like a great idea; I was wondering about something similar for configuring
> > applications; i.e. some way to save a "theme" for the applications I use (e.g. colours
> > for lynx matching the colours for man pages etc if you see what I mean)
> 
> You mean the user-specific dor-config-files?
> 

Hmmm... I'm just thinking aloud here; I'm not even sure if it's a useful idea, nor am I sure 
that I can explain it satisfactorialy :/

Ok, from the users perspective, it would look like this: A default configuration skeleton would
be installed (a default ~/.bashrc etc), as it is currently. The user would then be able to
apply, um, "themes" to their configuration - for example I like the highlight colour to be red,
so I would find myself going through ~/.pinerc, ~/.lynxrc etc making them all look the same...
the same applies to things like prompts, shells, editor of choice, my favorite mail program,
/etc/hosts etc etc.

How could this theming work? I thought perhaps a central data file, containing (bear with my
example please ;) things like $FAVORITE_COLOUR etc - a script could then be run to update the
appropiate rc files.

I'm picturing the data for the skeleton rc files being part of the ebuild package; I guess it
would have to be extracted to some database reminicient of termcap...

I don't think this is particularly urgent; as I said, I'm just thinking aloud. It's just an idea
to let you reconfigure everything to the way you like it... I'm not even sure I have exaplined
it correctly... basically cfengine but extended to allow for changing variables in rc files too

- Tom