what I would love

Posted Jan 29, 2011 18:17 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: what I would love by albertoafn
Parent article: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

I meant all kind of useful path or env variables, not just conf files. And yeah its a matter of the policy, but thats what they are trying to sort it out in this article, isnt it? :)

It would be very useful to be able to query something and get this kind of information, although gathering it together in the first place would be some kind of documentation problem: the code surely knows which environment variables and configuration files to read, but this information has to make it out of the code and into some other kind of description.

I only refer to policy because this provides the basis of any decision about where programs should put their configuration files, for example. But then again, having tried to get packages into Debian and running into policy errors (and being told to read the somewhat unfocused set of manuals), I can totally agree with the idea of having tools that make such information more available to people who might not be familiar with "where things go".

I also agree that are lots of things to do. maybe more important. But I just wanted to share some pointers that I always thought could be very useful and easy to do now that this matter is argued :)

I think it's great to have these kinds of discussions, though. :-) And nicer front-ends to repositories - I can imagine something like a Web shop (but without any financial transactions, of course) - is probably something on my long list of things to play with... if I ever get the time.