Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Freddie Cash]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 10:21 PM, Michael Gratton <michael at quuxo.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-03-22 at 20:59 -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
>  > On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Anders Nordby <anders at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> > >  conf.d (custom configuration)
>  > >  sites-available (virtualhost configuration)
>  > >  sites-enabled (symlinks for enabled virtualhosts)
>  > >  mods-available (available Apache modles)
>  > >  mods-enabled (symlinks for enabled Apache modules)
>  >
>  > Oh, gods, please, no!  That is one of the things I absolutely hate
>  > about Debian (and its derivatives).  There are some packages on Debian
>  > where they use separate text files for each configuration option
>  > (ProFTPd, for examples).  It is a huge mess of directories and files
>  > that makes it a *royal* PITA to edit at the CLI.
>
>  Actually, it makes two things really easy:
>
>  1. Automated installation of configuration required by other packages,
>  without them all munging and potentially breaking a single, central
>  config file. For example, you have Apache installed, and you want to
>  install PHP, the PHP port/package drops a file with the needed config
>  files into /etc/apache2/conf.d. No ad-hoc editing of httpd.conf
>  required, no loss of the work you did to customise it in the first
>  place.

A conf.d/ type directory for other ports to put config snippets into
might be useful, as it follows from the "include this file" setup.
Or, install the PHP config details into /usr/local/share/php/conf/ or
similar (since it's part of PHP) and then Include it into your
httpd.conf as needed.

>  2. As someone else pointed out, managing large numbers of vhosts (which
>  is really just a special case of #1.

Same as above.  No multitude of directories full of symlinks needed.
Although this is more of a personal preference than anything (we keep
all our virtualhosts in a single config file included into the main
httpd.conf so we can edit them all at once, which we do quite a bit).

>  > One of the things I *really* like about FreeBSD is that it has the
>  > "one config file per app/system" setup.
>
>  Until you install that one last port that breaks the config file you
>  spent hours tweaking.

Which is why the ports framework needs more support (or better details
of the support in the Porter's Handbook) for maintainers to say "this
is the config file, install it as config.sample, compare MD5 to
installed config, replace iff identical", without having to write
custom install targets for each port.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com