Call for testers -- CONF_FILES variable

[Chris Rees]

On 14 July 2011 22:29, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:
>> What bapt is talking about is that he doesn't want people to blindly
>> install the .sample files from the distfile, and actually _look_
>> through them.
>
> This is exactly what I expect the port to be doing. I do _not_ want
> the port maintainers to be touching the upstream sample conf files
> unless (a) they don't conform to hier(1) or (b) FreeBSD specific
> settings need to be enabled.

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

>> Of course, if you're changing the files at all you really shouldn't
>> use the .sample format, because the .sample format comes from the
>> distfile, not necessarily the port.
>
> There are two cases
> (1) The configuration needed a FreeBSD specific change (like adding
> /usr/local/bin to PATH or whatnot) then the .sample suffix should not
> be changed

It should-- it's not the original.

> (2) The port maintainer gratuitously changed the default configuration
> given by the upstream project.
> In the former case the suffix should not be changed. The latter case
> should not happen.

You have, I'm sure seen the state of a lot of ports' hierarchies --
the idea of the Ports Collection is to integrate and make uniform
(hopefully djb isn't listening) -- it IS the maintainer's job to do
that.

>> I think it's much politer for the users to receive a config file
>> that's almost usable.
>
> This is where we disagree. It may make sense for some very small
> projects to have the maintainer up set the configuration file. However
> for most programs (such as ssmtp, portmaster, aiccu, tarsnap, etc) it
> makes no sense for the maintainer of the port to making operator
> decisions.

You're always welcome to install from source, but the ports are there
for convenience.

Chris