From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lists.gentoo.org ([140.105.134.102] helo=robin.gentoo.org) by nuthatch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.54) id 1F8LH6-0002pK-JQ for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:44:41 +0000 Received: from robin.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with SMTP id k1CHgoJc017967; Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:42:50 GMT Received: from dns.ultratux.net (ultratux.xs4all.nl [80.126.98.237]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with ESMTP id k1CHYh0D001772 for ; Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:34:43 GMT Received: from morpheus.kijkduin ([10.42.42.142]) by dns.ultratux.net with esmtp (Exim 3.36 #1 (Debian)) id 1F8L7T-0003Qn-00 for ; Sun, 12 Feb 2006 18:34:43 +0100 Message-ID: <43EF7328.40103@ultratux.org> Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 18:40:56 +0100 From: Maarten User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (X11/20050824) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Handling of config updates, RFC References: <43EF3A25.9050301@ultratux.org> <200602120923.32166.bss03@volumehost.com> In-Reply-To: <200602120923.32166.bss03@volumehost.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: 9f8769aa-29f5-4613-bbfc-33f583c1abcd X-Archives-Hash: 186c5fbad9271bbfccd1891544566c6d Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: > On Sunday 12 February 2006 07:37, Maarten wrote about > '[gentoo-user] Handling of config updates, RFC': > >>What tickles me the most about the current process is that one sometimes >>gets huge lists of updated files by updating a single package. A package >>which may have never been used, or at least configured, by the user. >>For instance, updating webmin, or snort, yields many many ._cfg files an >>average user knows little about, and does not care about since he never >>tweaked them. In other words, they are in their distibution-default >>state, never edited. It stands to reason everyone would want all those >>files overwritten by the new ones, is it not ? Well, neither tool does >>that now. > > > 1) "The Gentoo Way" says that gentoo shouldn't make that decision for you. Nah. I think "The Gentoo Way" translates to "You can turn this behaviour ON or OFF at your discretion". I fail to see why yet another switch in the dispatch-conf.conf would do harm to the Gentoo Way, and neither what would be the drawbacks to shipping a stage tarball with all config dates set to a predefined past date which can serve as reference point... > 2) Check out your /etc/dispatch-conf.conf; It has options to automatically > perform a number of merges and even keep an RCS history of config files to > ensure that it is easy to rollback in breaking changes. I tell > dispatch-conf to automatically merge config files I haven't touched. I do too, but it still confronts me with 80+ files I have never touched. > I'd say the tools provided with portage, plus cfg-update, as mentioned by > the other poster, as more than capable for my use (actually, the only one > I /ever/ use is dispatch-conf). Before trying to stir up development > efforts on another method, please try and fully understand the tools > gentoo provides. I'm not saying config file maintainence couldn't be > improved in gentoo, but I think it's in a state that satisfied the > majority of users and (more importantly) developers. It does help to > tweak your CONFIG_PROTECT and CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK. Okay, I'll look into that, too. I understand the developers have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase, but I really think there is room for improvement in this area. Maybe most of you run nightly or weekly 'emerge world's (and thus can easily cope with the occasional 7 files needing merging), but we run a large number of servers, and therefore we only run emerge world a couple of times a year (at most). I can tell you from experience that emerge telling you "there are 231 config files needing attention" after such an update is _very_ discouraging. Especially since fixing that is only the beginning; after that you need to fix everything that broke (and boy do things break if you run an emerge after 6 months!). I'd mention udev, or apache, or gcc, but the list has plenty of examples... Not complaining; things break and such is life. But in the process, every step that is either tedious or time-consuming or unneccessary cuts into the time and effort needed for fixing stuff later on. And I think the current process of merging configs has all three of those aspects. But that's all IMHO, of course. regards, Maarten -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list