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Re: debian/RH question

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:

>  * 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.

I still have a mostly finished proposal for using Lars' tool to do
configuration lying around.  I quote from it:

The goals of this policy are:

- A consistent configuration interface to many packages.
- The necessary information to write a friendly front end to cfgtool.
- The ability to copy configuration information from one machine to
another.

The "friendly front end" is supposed to be some tk app.  That's why I
got Lars to implement variable attributes, which would be needed for
it.

Everybody got on the configuration-before-installation bandwagon
(which I still think is sort of unnecessary), so I never posted it.
If anybody is still interested in hammering out a coherent policy for
this, I'd be happy to talk to them.

>  * 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.

Surely pulling the necessary parts of dselect out into a shared lib is
easier than rewriring?  And there appear to be a half dozen
implementations of dependency resolving programs.  It's not a terribly
hard algorithm.

>  * 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 a very good way to do this in fact - use dpkg, but that might
be extremely slow.  You could also parse /var/lib/dpkg/available, but
Ian may frown on that as it would restrict his changes to the file's
format.


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

My proposal would have solved that.


Guy


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