[haiku-development] Re: RFC: Package management and handling of settings files
- From: pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:04:06 +0200
On 2013-04-23 at 17:01:40 [+0200], Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
wrote:
> 2. Potentially incompatible settings
>
> Not unheard of in ported software. Some kind of configuration file is
> required and the format respectively the default configuration changes.
> The package format could allow marking the file as "mergeable" for
> simple text formats, in which case an attempt could be made to merge
> changes made by the user with those introduced by the newer version.
>
> Handling:
> - Installation: If settings file is not installed, install it.
> Otherwise don't touch it.
> - Update: If not modified by the user, just replace the installed file.
> If modified by the user and marked "mergeable", try merging. In either
> case back up the old default version and, if modified, also the
> user-modified version.
> - Deinstallation: Remove, if desired; maybe back up.
>
> If the old settings file could not be replaced/merged, the package
> manager could issue a warning. The software may not run correctly --
> hopefully complaining about the configuration file on start-up. The user
> will have to fix the situation manually. Having backed-up versions of
> the old files will be helpful in such a case.
From my experience using Debian, this often doesn't work well. When the
merge fails (and it usually does), you're left with options of losing your
configuration, or risking to break something that was working. The other
option is trying to understand what's going on and try to merge stuff
yourself. As times goes, your custom config drifts away from the expected
format and becomes less and less easy to merge.
I'd not even try to support this at the package manager side. This is a
problem it can't solve. There are, on the other hand, valid solutions for
most software :
- Modifying software to understand older versions of the settings file.
Problem solved.
- Using a multi-file configuration. The default settings go in a read-only
directory, and the user can create a custom setting file in the user
settings dir, with only the settings he wants to override. This way, there
is nothing to merge, new options are added to the read-only file with
default values, and user customizations are kept.
--
Adrien.
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