Conffiles and configuration management systems

[Mathias Gug]

Hi,

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 02:47:39PM +0200, Loïc Minier wrote:
> On Tue, May 04, 2010, Soren Hansen wrote:
> > Add a capability to dpkg to let tools like puppet take over this conffile
> > merging process. Or, the poor man's alternative: add a capability to
> > dpkg to ignore specific conffiles.
> 
>  This sounds great!  When I read your proposal, I came up with another
>  use case for delegating the conffile merging stuff: multiple instances
>  of the same service.  I think it would be a step in the right direction
>  to make dpkg more flexible with respect to conffile handling.  That
>  said, things like ucf got a quite a lot of critics, not sure whether it
>  was because of its actual implementation or because it was just because
>  "it should be done in dpkg".
> 

Given that most conffiles are text files and that the problem we're looking at
is merging changes between different versions from different sources, all of
this starts to smell like a good use case for a VCS (see etckeeper): 

 * dpkg commits to a branch
 * puppet commits to the same (or another) branch
 * the admin is able to access a history of the configuration file as well
   as checking if a file has changed (and what has changed).

-- 
Mathias Gug
Ubuntu Developer  http://www.ubuntu.com