-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Heya,
I noticed the logrotate USE flag thread recently and did a bit of reading on the problem (ie read all the previous threads) as well as touching on the whole cron USE flag thoughts as well, and it struck me that it is really odd that this entire issue hasn't been sorted out a long time ago. I was always under the impression that our ebuilds should work, in whatever capacity that is possible, after being emerged. I did a little digging and found: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=3&chap=1 Under 1a, the third point states: "Your package, when complete and unmasked, is supposed to "just work" for the end-user. Tweaking the installed product to get it to work should be optional; thus you need to install the package with reasonable default settings." This strikes me as sane, lets face it, while many people are of the opinion that before using a package, say AIDE, that you should know all about it and read all the documentation then spend time writing a configuration file, most people will just want to emerge an integrity checker and have something working. Additionally it seems to me that tools like etc-update and dispatch-conf were written to manage maintaining configuration files. While I understand various developers concerns about cluttering /etc (especially embedded), I don't see why this should stop the policy of writting ebuilds that work and have expected tools around them. Precisely what that constitutes is the real question. My concern right now is that we have no common way of dealing with ebuilds. Some ebuilds work after an emerge, some don't, some have example config files but they require the user to copy it over and modify it, some ebuilds have {cron,logrotate} entries that they just install, some use a USE flag, some don't even have any of the above when you would reasonably expect them to and so on. The point is that because of the lack of enforcement on whether ebuilds should work after an emerge and what that means (ie does it include things you expect as a sysadmin? logrotate and cron entries would normally qualify as such, especially for example logrotate for syslog-ng) we have a completely inconsistant user experience, each time someone emerges an ebuild its unclear what the user has to do, if anything, to make the application work. Is it possible to get a clear statement of policy (if the point I already quoted isn't already) as to what state the ebuild should leave the system after installation. Can we get agreement as to how to treat configuration files, either directly related to the ebuild or subsidary ones like cron / logrotate / selinux ? I think that doing so would significantly improve the consistancy of Gentoo which would be a win all round. I know that there are always some exceptions but I believe that having working configuration files and consistant treatment of various supporting scripts should be perfectly possible for the vast majority of ebuilds. - -- Benjamin Smee (strerror) crypto/forensics/netmail/netmon -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.9.20 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFD31QPAEpm7USL54wRAiRSAJ9AdBPy2LNtznWT564gkkEYWT7PwACffayk sDVgyQfdCm81J04Fvc2Z21I= =u/cy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
