eBox - the story continues :)

[Martin Pitt]

Hi Soren,

Soren Hansen [2007-08-01  2:56 +0200]:
> While adding schemas to the LDAP server is likely to be useful for many
> different packages, setting up ntpd or a dhcp server isn't.
> Traditionally, this has been of interest only to the package itself (and
> the admin, of course), but now when dealing with a framework like eBox
> which is supposed to be used to manage different services (e.g.  ntpd
> and dhcp), how would you recommend going about this?
> 
> The most straight-forward solution would be if there existed a special
> no-conf version of the ntp package.

I think this is too crackful. We should not try to invent a lot of
different patterns of how configuration and packaging works in
conjunction with ebox.

My feeling is that this should be handled with /etc/default files and
a sane default behaviour of packages.

E. g. it would make sense for dhcp3-server not to start at all if
/etc/default/dhcp3-server does not have any value for INTERFACES. I'm
not sure what the current out of the box default is, but IIRC it
does not have any default interface there. As per our previous
discussion, ebox should only be concerned about the default files (at
least initially).

With ntpd it might be a little different. I haven't checked, but let's
just say it'd listen to all interfaces by default. I see two
possiblities here:

 * If it makes sense to have a service run by default, don't touch
   anything. ebox will read the configuration, see that it is enabled,
   and allow you to tweak it.

 * If a manually installed service shall run by default, but not if it
   is only pulled in as ebox dependency (such as ntpd), then a
   workaround would be to have the ebox preinst create the ntp default
   file (if not present already) and disable it there, so that
   installation of ntpd will end up with no actual action and daemon.

   This is still a Gross Hack™, but IMHO still better than diverting
   configuration files, RC symlinks, and tramping over existing user
   configuration.

This does not rule out that some server packages need to be changed,
of course, but that should happen in a consistent way that doesn't
break the default behaviour when installing them manually.

What do you think?

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org
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