[OT] Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Arch hooks

[Andrew Suffield]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 10:52:54AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>     Andrew> Mwahaha. apacheconfig is loathed and detested by
>     Andrew> everybody, I think. I'm told the one for apache2 is
>     Andrew> significantly less broken.
> 
>     Andrew> [...]
> 
>     Andrew> Ah, the problem here is that apt is a moronic and horribly
>     Andrew> broken pile of code. We know this, even if far too many
>     Andrew> users don't :)
> 
>     Andrew> (aptitude inherits the braindamage and then adds some of
>     Andrew> its own; dselect just calls "apt-get dselect-upgrade" at
>     Andrew> present, which is no better)
> 
> Exactly.  But the point is that all of this is user-inaccessible
> because it's written in an obscure little language implemented in
> Perl.  Might as well be compiled to machine code most of the time.

Only apacheconfig is perl, and the problem there is really that it's a
useless piece of poorly written crap. Not sure what you mean here.

> And fixing that is explicitly a design non-goal.  We're trying to
> appeal to the Macintrash/Windoze/GookTK crowd,

I'm not sure who you're talking about there, but it sure isn't
Debian. Almost all of *us* are trying to make the best distribution
*for* us. Opinions on how far we should go to support other people
vary from "Who cares?" to "Best effort". People who suggest supporting
users at the expense of developers will likely get punched in the
nose, usually by the developers on the receiving end.

The purpose of all these sort of tools in Debian is to reduce the
amount of work involved in administering and using systems to an
absolute minimum, for somebody who knows what they're doing. Some
people have broader goals, but that's the prevailing/common/whatever
one at present.

> and don't stop to have
> a little humility and realize that almost all of them have enough clue
> to #ifdef out the call to apacheconfig, if they could only find it.

Top of my head:

dpkg-divert --add /usr/sbin/apacheconfig
ln -s /bin/true /usr/sbin/apacheconfig

That should make it go away. There's usually a way, you just have to
know where to kick stuff. apacheconfig worked well enough when it
first appeared, but isn't up to the job any more, and nobody has been
willing to put up with the inevitable breakage that would result from
trying to fix it. It still _works_ for the basic stuff in the majority
of cases, it's just no use if you have a complicated apache
configuration.

In general: if a program like this is working *against* a reasonable
sysadmin, and can't be stopped, we'd consider that a serious
bug. (Broken by default is a trickier one... some defaults just don't
have a right value for everybody). Some guarantees are supposed to be
permanently present (like "diversions will stick" and "user-edited
config files will stay the way they were edited unless told
otherwise") which will be adequete for most cases.

> My bet is that the replacement to apt will fix apt's known problems
> but be designed the same way.  Viz dexconf.

Not if I have anything to do with it >:)

Really, apt is the result of work towards the (now floundered) deity
project, which aptitude has effectively replaced. apt-get was for
testing the library, and never intended for general use; it's been
forced into a role that wasn't expected, and it shows (if you know
where to look). Note that apt itself still has a 0.* version.

dexconf is a tricky one. In principle it's a nice idea, but it has
proven difficult to get right. I know Branden's reworked things
several times without user-visible changes in an effort to get it
halfway bearable. The latest (as in, last few weeks) should be a
significant improvement, if only he could write shell scripts that
weren't broken.

[It's difficult to give specific responses to general stuff like
this. The more specific you are about problems, the easier it is to
determine which category they fall into:
a) stuff which has a workaround
b) bugs, some of which may be difficult to fix. Please report them,
Debian's been going 10 years and we're still finding huge flaws in
core tools which have been there all along and *never been noticed*
before]

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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