Re: [gentoo-dev] Package configuration

[Daniel Robbins]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 11:42:34AM +0100, Geert Bevin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been playing a bit with portage and try to create a stable and easy
> to use postgres package. Doing this I noticed something missing in
> portage (maybe I'm just overlooking it, and then all what follows is
> obsolete ;-) ).
>
> Typically a package has a configuration phase which occurs after merging
> it into the system. This configuration is optional, but could be done
> both for binary as source packages. For postgres this is for example the
> initialization and installation of an empty database instance. Rocklinux
> solves this in a very simple and easy to use manner. It contains an
> /etc/setup.d/ directory with simple shell scripts prepended by numbers
> in their names (eg. 00-general, 10-gpm, 20-network, 50-sshd, 70-pgsql,
> ...) It uses these numbers to execute all configs sequentially when a
> binary clean install is done from cd. This makes the initial
> configuration process modular and very manageable.
>
> When installing a package, emerge could monitor /etc/setup.d/ in a
> similar way as it monitors /etc and report whether a new config file is
> present and that it can be executed to configure the package that just
> was merged.
>
> I hope I explained clearly enough. Tell me what you think of it.

First, I realize that I'm over 40 days late in responding to this email. :)
Sorry about that; I'm finally cleaning out my inbox and catching up on email
that I haven't read yet.

Yes, I think that this could be a really nice arrangement.  But rather than
manually assign a number, I think it would be great if emerge were to auto-
assign the number.  This is how I see it working.  When emerge installs a
package, that package may have installation notes or additional configuration
steps.  So, a package could provide a "setup" file which emerge records in
/etc/setup.d.  Then, when the emerge is complete, emerge would print something
like this:

Additional setup required!  Type emerge --setup to continue.

At which point, the setup scripts could be executed sequentially.  This would
allow for interactive setup of various tools 'n stuff as well.  Since the
setup scripts aren't executed directly in the emerge, they can be interactive.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins                                  <drobbins@g.o>
Chief Architect/President                       http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.