Re: debian/RH question

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

Some of you may remember awhile back I proposed an X interface to the
configuration of Debian and volunteered to write such a thing myself.
There seemed to be some interest, so I set out to start on it, but soon
ran into some serious problems:

 * Package configuration is all done in text mode.  It is messy at best
   for an X interface to have to be popping up xterms all over the place.
   The shell interface is *not* a good one for package configurations.
   (I have some ideas on better ones -- if interested, mail me.)

   This is the single biggest problem.

 * The routines in dselect used for determining dependencies,
   reccommendations, etc. are not built into .so format that Tcl/Tk
   can dynamically load.  Reimplementing all of those functions
   for an X program is a huge waste of time -- time I don't have to
   spend.

 * There is no easy way for an outside program to gain information about
   the packages installed in the system and the status of the available
   packages.

 * There is no unified or semi-unified configuration system.  In RedHat,
   there is the /etc/sysconfig directory.  Debian has no equivolent of
   that.

So my project of writing an X version of dselect/dftp kinda went down the
tubes.  As things stand right now, an X version of these tools really
isn't possible.

Again, the single largest problem is the configuration.  First, there are
the text-mode-only shell scripts.  Then there are problems with there
being no unified configuration file format.

On 5 Feb 1997, Rob Browning wrote:

> Fabien Ninoles <ninf01@ptah.GEL.USherb.CA> writes:
> 
> > I've never used myself dftp but really appreciate your
> > demonstration. Do you think we can make a tk or ncurses interface
> > with it ? I personnally like all the warnings and info but some
> > users are really used to the "just say me what I already know" from
> > Windows or other 'user friendly / power user unfriendly' system.
> 
> Well, it would certainly be possible, but I probably won't be the one
> to do it anytime soon.  I know perl-tk, but I have too much else going
> on right now, and little incentive to work on that since I'm perfectly
> happy with the terminal interface.  I may eventually upgrade the
> terminal interface to ncurses, but don't hold your breath :>
> 
> Dftp works pretty well as it is, and I'd rather spend the time adding
> dependency sorting (potentially via pkg-order) and considering the
> issues involved in making it easier to orchestrate mutiple-machine
> upgrades from a single program.  I'm not talking about the
> configuration database stuff (though that will help), but more about a
> simple, multi-machine dftp.
> 
> The assumption would be that you'd have a number of packages that were
> common to all the machines, and could be handled identically, and then
> a much smaller list of packages that you had to deal with representing
> each machine's special cases.  You'd go through the same steps as you
> do now with dftp, but answer more questions (the machine specific
> ones).  Then dftp would handle getting all the necessary packages to
> each relevant machine (or where they could see them), and running all
> the installs sequentially (or perhaps if you have X, in parallel
> rxvt's).  You'd still have to be there to handle any installer
> interaction on each machine, but it would be much faster than what we
> have now.
> 
> Thanks
> -- 
> Rob
> 
> 
> --
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John Goerzen          | Running Debian GNU/Linux (www.debian.org)
Custom Programming    | 
jgoerzen@complete.org | 


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