Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Michael Gratton]

On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 10:06 -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 10:21 PM, Michael Gratton <michael at quuxo.com> wrote:
> >  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.

Yes, conf.f is very useful. Having to add a manual Include (if the
software even supports it is less so, if you quite reasonably expect a
port/package to Just Work after having installed it.

> >  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.

It does seem like overkill, until you start using it.

The main reason it is useful (apart from avoiding the risk of a bad edit
nuking some or all of your config) is that you can use standard command
line tools, or very basic custom scripts to easily add, delete, enable,
disable and query vhosts. All without having to write a parser for the
script or having to navigate the config file in a text editor.

Done right, the same tools can be used for many different servers that
support the same config file scheme.

If you really need to edit all in one hit, use `vi *' or sed or
something.

> httpd.conf so we can edit them all at once, which we do quite a bit).

Why do you frequently need to edit all vhosts at once? Do you like to
change the location for everyone's log files, making it fun for people
to find them? :) But seriously, I find this surprising - once running,
the only thing most need to do is enable/disable or delete one here or
there, or perform the occasional requested config tweak.

> 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.

Yes, and that works fine until you install PHP and it nukes your Apache
config file...

/Mike

-- 
Michael Gratton <michael at quuxo.com>     
Quuxo Software <http://web.quuxo.com/>
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