webmin, zentyal, conf file policy, etc

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, October 03, 2012 02:22:26 PM Tyler J. Wagner wrote:
> On 2012-10-03 14:05, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > It's not a question of fair or not fair.  The policy is what it is for
> > good
> > reasons.  It does not say that external packages are not allowed to change
> > configuration, but that they have to do so via a program provided by the
> > package.  This gives a defined interface and reduces the risk of incorrect
> > changes.  I think this makes a lot of sense.
> 
> I agree, but the problem is that most programs don't have this. If you are
> lucky, a program supports "change the configuration files and SIGHUP the
> daemon". Why doesn't Debian policy require them have this interface? In the
> absence of that requirement, the onus is on the webmin team to do their
> work for them.

There are tens of thousands of packages in the Debian archive.  Only a small 
fraction would benefit from such a capability.  I general requirement is 
overkill.

Fundamentally this runs into the problem of there being no standard method in 
the *nix world of defining and managing configuration.  There are some attempts, 
like augeaus.  A middle ground would be for webmin to implement support for a 
preferred tool like augeaus and then prefer to use it's interface for 
applications that ship an augeaus lens (I think that's what they are called).

That would allow webmin to (with a manageable amount of work) support a common 
interface standard that upstreams or package maintainers could support (and 
would useful on lots of distros, not just Debian and it's derivatives).

Scott K