learning from Gentoo; an ITP
Was going to be "Significant choices"
- but we've seen Debian CAN make choices
Yuri Vasilevski (conversations)
- gentoo developer
daemons started on upgrade, apt-get install
conffiles must be updated prior
- dpkg's merge support fairly primitive (Y/N/D/Z)
- tends to discourage modification of conffiles
- config files w/versions or CVS id painful
- ~/.zshrc etc ; /etc/default/
gentoo different:
- daemons started only manually
- dispatch-conf can be used to find config files needing update
- stores history using rcs
- can handle CVS cruft, whitespace while merging
- completly different from Debian
better for some situations
let's do both!
- invoke-rc.d can be used to control daemon startup during apt run
- no policy scripts in Debian yet, high time we wrote some
- probably a complete set for all likely sysadmin wants
- no starting daemons on upgrade
- no starting on new installs
- no starting ever (also good for chroots)
- exceptions to start or not start specified daemons (needs addition to policy layer)
- record daemons that were not stopped/started for manual admin'n
- --force-confold can be used to avoid replaing conffiles
consider this an ITP...
value of broader viewpoints in a non-flamey RL environment
- lots to learn (and teach) from others
- should invite some other representatives of other distros to next debconf