Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Thomas Flavel <thomasfl@××××××××××××.uk>
To: gentoo-dev@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Tom
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 09:10:05
Message-Id: 20010125161057.A26673@tsuny.ctn.cogs.susx.ac.uk
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Tom by 320095285153-0001@t-online.de (Achim Gottinger)
1 On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 02:03:01PM +0100, Achim Gottinger wrote:
2 > > >
3 > > > > From what I can see it has a binary cd version, with the option
4 > > > > to compile from source (the same thing I was talking about, if I understand them
5 > > > > correctly). It describes it's package management as closer to FreeBSD than debian.
6 > > > > It looks to be quite similar to gentoo to me, although not quite as advanced.
7 > > >
8 > > > I took a look at the site and think that we need something similar to cfengine
9 > > > sometimes.
10 > >
11 > > That looks like a great idea; I was wondering about something similar for configuring
12 > > applications; i.e. some way to save a "theme" for the applications I use (e.g. colours
13 > > for lynx matching the colours for man pages etc if you see what I mean)
14 >
15 > You mean the user-specific dor-config-files?
16 >
17
18 Hmmm... I'm just thinking aloud here; I'm not even sure if it's a useful idea, nor am I sure
19 that I can explain it satisfactorialy :/
20
21 Ok, from the users perspective, it would look like this: A default configuration skeleton would
22 be installed (a default ~/.bashrc etc), as it is currently. The user would then be able to
23 apply, um, "themes" to their configuration - for example I like the highlight colour to be red,
24 so I would find myself going through ~/.pinerc, ~/.lynxrc etc making them all look the same...
25 the same applies to things like prompts, shells, editor of choice, my favorite mail program,
26 /etc/hosts etc etc.
27
28 How could this theming work? I thought perhaps a central data file, containing (bear with my
29 example please ;) things like $FAVORITE_COLOUR etc - a script could then be run to update the
30 appropiate rc files.
31
32 I'm picturing the data for the skeleton rc files being part of the ebuild package; I guess it
33 would have to be extracted to some database reminicient of termcap...
34
35 I don't think this is particularly urgent; as I said, I'm just thinking aloud. It's just an idea
36 to let you reconfigure everything to the way you like it... I'm not even sure I have exaplined
37 it correctly... basically cfengine but extended to allow for changing variables in rc files too
38
39 - Tom