Hi KP I had lots of thoughts this weekend on the way how to make a configuration system independent of the underlying OS and the installed applications. Well, I found none that really cuts it especially when I am looking at the controversy release 5.0.0 of shorwall stirred. the *x systems unfortunately failed to impose to developers a standardized way to configure their code.
At the same time the actual configdb is a pretty weak attempt to save information across releases, as there is no way to predict the decisions of a developer how to parse the config files. We have seen cases, where completely correct configs from one release to another failed, just because someone decided not to accept blank spaces in the config parser. And very recently a few new lines in fstab made it impossible to log into a system unless I had a serial console. I do not believe that running apkg -u with packages from an unrelated release would cut it either. The above issue could easily be solved if we would not save the entire config files, but the difference of the active config and the virgin config in the installed .lrp package. This difference could then be applied at configdb load and it might indeed improve the portability of config files. I do not pretend this will save the whole western world, but it might be an improvement of the existing configuration clash. It might fail for really heavy configuration file format changes, but it would probably survive most trivial changes in config files. It would, of course, require the patch utility to be included as a busybox applet and quite some tweaking of the apkg script to generate and handle patch files. On the other hand it would make very small configdb files, but building them might take a while. Right now this is just a castle in the air and there are more pressing issues right now, but I might investigate into it in the near to midterm future. cheeers ET ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ leaf-devel mailing list leaf-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
