On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Micah Anderson wrote:
I think branding, when it comes to icons, themes, backgrounds, etc. can be done relatively gracefully with debconf preseeding as was outlined above. However, as more variables are uncovered that people want to brand, and as CDDs drift from branding the graphical, to "branding" a configuration file so that the software works a particular way with specific variables set, then debconf preseeding becomes a package maintainer's nightmare. Can you imagine creating low-priority debconf questions for every possible postfix configuration variable and then having to maintain that for every new version of postfix? What about amavis that seems to have thousands of variables? At some point the package maintainer is not going to be happy with all this extra work. Does it make sense to abstract all package's configuration variables into debconf? Can debconf handle it? Should we be thinking of another way to abstract configuration?
Surely not. But do you *really* think that all CDDs are so different that we have to touch all these things you mentioned. I guess there will be some work left for local administrators. Perhaps we should start with an analysis what current CDDs have to change and try to estimate then if the debconf approach makes sense or if you are right here and debconf does not scale for our purpose.
If the user is running a CDD, how will they deal with updating packages? What if a package has a new configuration variable, or an old one changes or becomes removed, or one variable changes that messes up another that was preseeded? Will they have to wait for the CDD-custom-branding package to be updated that will fix this default preseeded configuration before they can function again? If so, then the CDD maintainers will have to maintain a number of these things and will have to also find a way to deal with users changing the settings on their machines and then having to reconcile with the package maintainer, and/or with the CDD brander.
IMHO this is the harder issue.
The thing we are toying with here is that there currently is:
upstream ---> package maintainer ---> user
but CDDs are turning this into:
upstream ---> package maintainer ---> CDD maintainer ---> user
Yes, this is a very good shortcut for the idea. I'll move it to the docs...
Kind regards
Andreas.
