Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > i think i said it before: i hate /etc/examples/ and think that the > directory ought to be mostly empty.
We'll get to that. With the exception of rare > cases like bgpd(8), where you have to provide a lot of information > before you can start it in any meaningful way, i consider a deamon > ill-designed if the configuration is so complicated that a file in > /etc/examples/ serves any purpose. Daemons should have a reasonable > default configuration, such that a configuration file is not needed > for typical usage, and if people add a configuration file, they > ought to get away with very few lines. By the way, acme-client(1) > is an example where i was happy to recently see people work into just > that direction. reading between the lines, I think you recognize the difficulty in changing grammer. the acme-client thing was a good step, but enough -current users already failed their key rotations, that we can tell there will be challenges when 6.7 is shipped. I am certain you aren't proposing we change a yacc tomorrow. > Providing example configuration files is an idiotic concept because > if you copy them into /etc/, you no longer easily see what the > defaults are, what generic recommendations are, and what was changed > locally. It should be made easy to write short configuration files > from scratch such that they contain absolutely nothing except local > changes. But then you take another shot at it. "It should be made easy". Your email lacks proposed changes to any .y files. > For daemons designed as described, if they have some complicated > configuration commands for special purposes, a few typical > examples of these commands can be shown in the EXAMPLES section of > the manual page. And then, for many configuration files, you can't simply cut-and-paste, because there's an indent to the line you need to remove, and additional long lines could be improper, and tabs turned into spaces. Awesome, except it isn't. > Note that in the past, there was no consensus about the above, so > i'm not suggesting that we move all the examples into the manual > pages. I'm only saying *trivial* files in /etc/examples/ should > be deleted and the content, if any, moved to the manual pages. Some > files will no doubt remain, and there is nothing wrong with that. Let's step back. The example files were moved from /etc, so that /etc contained fewer files for unconfigured software. Little to no effort was put into curating them. That's the gap that occured. But then you start talking about removing files, changing configuration languages, and deck-chair shuffling into manual pages as if it can be done simply and will always result in an improvement. I am reading a large action plan full of generic suggestions without any specifics.
