Re: [gentoo-user] Things that can be improved

[Alexander Skwar]

Walter Dnes schrieb:
> On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 09:22:29PM +0200, Rafael Fern??ndez L??pez wrote
>
>>   This is not flame war. I love Gentoo, and it is the distribution
>> that fits me perfectly, but I've been wondering this last year what
>> things can be improved in this wonderful distro.
>>
>>   The first thing that I'd change is "etc-update" or "dispatch-conf".
>
>   etc-update needs only one change to make it perfect for me, namely the
> ability to protect changes to default parameters.  Here are 3 examples
> from a recent update, where an automaton has no business touching
> certain lines...
>
> /etc/conf.d/bootmisc
> -WIPE_TMP="yes"
> +WIPE_TMP="no"
>
> /etc/conf.d/local.start
>  # This is a good place to load any misc programs
> -# on startup ( use 1>&2 to hide output)
> -modprobe snd-virmidi index=1
> +# on startup (use &>/dev/null to hide output)
> +
>
> /etc/conf.d/rc
> @@ -74,7 +89,12 @@
>  # and restore it on startup.  This is useful if you have a lot of
>  # custom device nodes that udev does not handle/know about.
>
> -RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="yes"
> +RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="no"
> +
>
>   When I say "yes" I mean "yes".  When I say "no" I mean "no".  And I
> don't mean "just until the next update" either.  I have reasons for my
> settings; please don't act like Windows and assume that you know better
> than me.

But actually, they do *NOT* pretend to know better! The way it is
now, is, that you're asked if you wish to accept those changes

>  And there is no excuse whatsoever for wiping out the custom
> settings in /etc/conf.d/local.start
>
>   Would it be possible to have some comment declaration like...
>
> #etc-update-protect-begin
> WIPE_TMP="yes"
> #etc-update-protect-end
>
> ...to protect a block of lines against changes, while allowing other
> lines to be changed?

Hm - that might actually be a good idea. While there are certain
*parts* in a configuration file that can be updated, there are
certain parts, that shouldn't be.

BUT: How should that actually work? Suppose you had this "etc-upadte-protect-begin"
and "-end" block. How should diff see, that changes in such a block
are NOT to be considered? I mean, in the original file, there's *no*
such block (and I actually wouldn't want such a block to be in default
configuration files).

Alexander Skwar
-- 
grasshopotomaus:
	A creature that can leap to tremendous heights... once.
-- 
gentoo-user@g.o mailing list