The new Fedora Project [LWN.net]

The new Fedora Project

Posted Sep 25, 2003 3:06 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659)
In reply to: The new Fedora Project by brouhaha
Parent article: The new Fedora Project

You ran into debconf, which lets you choose configuration options and have them preserved across upgrades regardless of file format changes. Next time, just set your threshold priority to "critical" and the defaults will be used for 95% of the questions (or thereabouts, I haven't actually measured but it's about this). Then just run "dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low <packagename>" to adjust any individual package.

The RPM alternative is to live in config file hell, where you use emacs/vi and manpages to configure each package by hand, only to have every single one of your configs borked on the next upgrade! Manually updating several dozen config files to new formats is a real PITA...

Given the choice, I'll take Debian any time!

(Log in to post comments)

The new Fedora Project

Posted Sep 25, 2003 15:31 UTC (Thu) by heinlein (guest, #1029) [Link]

The RPM alternative is to live in config file hell, where you use emacs/vi and manpages to configure each package by hand, only to have every single one of your configs borked on the next upgrade! Manually updating several dozen config files to new formats is a real PITA...

That's less true with each Red Hat release. The /etc/sysconfig directory is becoming home to localizations that can be kept through an update or maintained with a tool like cfengine.

Plus, rpm package maintainers are paying more attention to marking configuration files as such so that new packages don't stomp on customized config files.