[Config4gnu-developer] Re: cfg: Debian

[Justin Y. <ju...@sk...>]

On Wed, 2002-12-04 at 12:24, Mark Howard wrote:
> Hi,
>   I'm just about to finish uni for the Christmas vacation and thought it
> might be interesting to look at your project. From what I've seen so
> far, I'm very impressed. The task, however, is huge and many people have
> failed in the past. I hope you persevere and are successful.

It does seem daunting at times. :)

> A few weeks ago, when the Debian desktop subproject was formed, I
> proposed that one of it's aims should be to tackle to 'configuration
> nightmare' linking to that fm][ article. Very few ppl were interested in
> this, saying that it was far too much work. However, I still believe
> that the only way such a system as your is to succeed is if it is
> adopted by one of the large distributions. The sooner this happens, the
> more interest and so more development you will get. Therefore, I would
> like to work with cfg Debian integration.

We'd be *very* interested in getting Debian to support it.  We think
that if we could get one or two major distributions (Debian and Gentoo
were some of our top candidates) to support/use CFG in some way, and
maybe get a major software project (Apache, Samba, etc.) to support it,
we'll be in pretty good shape.  So having Debian on board in any way is
a great thing.

> My main aims over the vacation would be to familiarise myself with your
> work, start producing Debian packages of cvs snapshots and possibly look
> into writing a debconf (debian configuration system, used by many
> packages to set up initial configuration) back end for cfg.
> Unfortunately, I have never looked into debconf before, so it would
> involve learning.

Well, I can say I'm not terribly familiar with debconf.  We're in the
process of cleaning up some aspects of our project, specifically the
documentation on our website.  This should be done by the 18th at the
latest, as we have some things to finish before the end of the semester
to fulfill some requirements we have (CFG is being started as a project
to meet some graduation requirements, but it certainly won't stop there
if its successful).  

We have a lot of code in CVS, but most of it is prototypes we're made to
test out our ideas & look into how feasible this project is.  I would
probably not recommend spending too much time looking through our code.

However, I *would* recommend familiarizing yourself with the
documentation on our website which outlines our goals, our design
concept, etc.  Again, these docs are slightly out of date at the moment
and will be updated.  I can drop you a line when they're cleaned up to
better reflect the current state of things.

Right now, we've got little code I would recommend actually using, and
I'd also recommend NOT having it edit your real config filees, so don't
run it as root so that it can't.  If you want to make CVS snapshot
packages for Debian, you can, I'm just not sure whether it would be
useful at *this* point.  In the near future (Feb or March?), they'd be
great to help get feedback & facilitate testing.  

> So, would you like my help with this? 

Yes.

> and has anyone else started work
> on Debian related aspects of the project already?

No, but we have thought about what it will take to have CFG support
various distros.  So, perhaps you could both help us refine our ideas on
distro support and help with testing/support for Debian.  Anything else
you'd like to help with (general feedback, coding, etc.) would be great
as well.


Thanks for your interest in our project.

Justin

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