Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: > On Sunday 12 February 2006 07:37, Maarten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
