Re: [gentoo-user] Handling of config updates, RFC

[Maarten]

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> On Sunday 12 February 2006 07:37, Maarten <gentoo@××××××××.org> wrote about
> '[gentoo-user] Handling of config updates, RFC':
>
>>What tickles me the most about the current process is that one sometimes
>>gets huge lists of updated files by updating a single package. A package
>>which may have never been used, or at least configured, by the user.
>>For instance, updating webmin, or snort, yields many many ._cfg files an
>>average user knows little about, and does not care about since he never
>>tweaked them. In other words, they are in their distibution-default
>>state, never edited.  It stands to reason everyone would want all those
>>files overwritten by the new ones, is it not ?  Well, neither tool does
>>that now.
>
>
> 1) "The Gentoo Way" says that gentoo shouldn't make that decision for you.

Nah. I think "The Gentoo Way" translates to "You can turn this behaviour
ON or OFF at your discretion".  I fail to see why yet another switch in
the dispatch-conf.conf would do harm to the Gentoo Way, and neither what
 would be the drawbacks to shipping a stage tarball with all config
dates set to a predefined past date which can serve as reference point...

> 2) Check out your /etc/dispatch-conf.conf; It has options to automatically
> perform a number of merges and even keep an RCS history of config files to
> ensure that it is easy to rollback in breaking changes.  I tell
> dispatch-conf to automatically merge config files I haven't touched.

I do too, but it still confronts me with 80+ files I have never touched.

> I'd say the tools provided with portage, plus cfg-update, as mentioned by
> the other poster, as more than capable for my use (actually, the only one
> I /ever/ use is dispatch-conf).  Before trying to stir up development
> efforts on another method, please try and fully understand the tools
> gentoo provides.  I'm not saying config file maintainence couldn't be
> improved in gentoo, but I think it's in a state that satisfied the
> majority of users and (more importantly) developers.  It does help to
> tweak your CONFIG_PROTECT and CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK.

Okay, I'll look into that, too.

I understand the developers have better things to do than go on a wild
goose chase, but I really think there is room for improvement in this
area.  Maybe most of you run nightly or weekly 'emerge world's (and thus
can easily cope with the occasional 7 files needing merging), but we run
a large number of servers, and therefore we only run emerge world a
couple of times a year (at most). I can tell you from experience that
emerge telling you "there are 231 config files needing attention" after
such an update is _very_ discouraging. Especially since fixing that is
only the beginning; after that you need to fix everything that broke
(and boy do things break if you run an emerge after 6 months!). I'd
mention udev, or apache, or gcc, but the list has plenty of examples...

Not complaining; things break and such is life. But in the process,
every step that is either tedious or time-consuming or unneccessary cuts
into the time and effort needed for fixing stuff later on. And I think
the current process of merging configs has all three of those aspects.
But that's all IMHO, of course.

regards,
Maarten
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