Ok what about the following.

The problem that is most existent in this case is the fact that you want the 
eclass to support almost every kind of use. That is nice indeed. But making 
things easy for single hostname smalltime servers, and for extensive virtual 
hosting supports with customized webservers etc. is complicated. Also in that 
case default apache configuration snippets don't make that much sense. I 
think a solution could be to introduce a "local" useflag that selects 
behaviour.

If you have a simple webserver for personal use, you can just leave things as 
they are and you can just run the config script or take some simple actions 
and everything works. For the other case the configuration tool can be used 
to create instances of a webapp for different virtual servers. That tool 
would probably need some configuration file etc. and it might even perform 
changes to the CONTENTS file to make the instances being included in the 
ebuild (when removing). It could then also automatically change the slot of 
the installed package so that it does not automatically get removed.

I think that should be able to keep both sides happy.

Paul

ps. one thing I want to add though is that for a simple installation I think 
the configuration files should be config-protected (how that is aranged I 
don't care), and for complex setups the instance configurations should also 
be protected in some way (but that might be handled by the tool)

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Researcher
Mail: pauldv@cs.kun.nl
Homepage: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pauldv