"cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So you can for example have 4 config sets (each in its own location): > - one with the upstream default values > - one with overrides for upstream settings by maintainer > - one with cdd-overrides for the settings > - one with admin-overrides for the settings > > Each party can then change his settings independently of the others, > overriding (only) the defaults they care about.
This is essentially the same in a TeX system - the number of config sets is theoretically unlimited. >> It would be nice to notify the user about changes in the default >> config and give the choice of a diff or 3 way merge. Maybe this is >> something that could be added to ucf (e.g. option >> --modified-file=/etc/texmf/foo) and then present the user with the >> same options and frontend as with normal config files. > > If (as is the case for KDE, Gnome and XFCE) the granularity when combinying > the different configuration settings is per config-key and not config-file > any merge problems basically disappear: you just make sure you set the > search path to reflect the precedence among the various configuration sets, > any changes made by a party whose configuration settings have lower > precedence are then used transparently unless you've overriden that > specific setting. This is different in a TeX system: There is only one major configuration file, texmf.cnf, for which per-setting overrides work. In all other cases only one file is read; and in most of these cases this cannot be changed, because the files are simply TeX input files, and we cannot change TeX's behavior wrt to reading files. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer