learning from Gentoo; an ITP

• Was going to be "Significant choices"

  • but we've seen Debian CAN make choices

• Yuri Vasilevski (conversations)

  • gentoo developer

• daemons started on upgrade, apt-get install

• conffiles must be updated prior

  • dpkg's merge support fairly primitive (Y/N/D/Z)
  • tends to discourage modification of conffiles
  • config files w/versions or CVS id painful
  • ~/.zshrc etc ; /etc/default/

• gentoo different:

  • daemons started only manually
  • dispatch-conf can be used to find config files needing update
    • stores history using rcs
    • can handle CVS cruft, whitespace while merging
• completly different from Debian

• better for some situations

• let's do both!

• invoke-rc.d can be used to control daemon startup during apt run
  • no policy scripts in Debian yet, high time we wrote some
  • probably a complete set for all likely sysadmin wants
    • no starting daemons on upgrade
    • no starting on new installs
    • no starting ever (also good for chroots)
    • exceptions to start or not start specified daemons (needs addition to policy layer)
  • record daemons that were not stopped/started for manual admin'n
• --force-confold can be used to avoid replaing conffiles

• consider this an ITP...

• value of broader viewpoints in a non-flamey RL environment

• lots to learn (and teach) from others
• should invite some other representatives of other distros to next debconf