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bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system'
From: |
Alex Kost |
Subject: |
bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system' |
Date: |
Thu, 04 Jun 2015 17:43:55 +0300 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (gnu/linux) |
Ludovic Courtès (2015-06-03 12:52 +0300) wrote:
> Alex Kost <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> I see some inconsistency in specifying text / text files in an
>> operating-system declaration:
>
> Yeah, I agree it is somewhat annoying that there’s no single way to
> handle this. But...
>
>> - ‘sudoers’ and ‘issue’ want plain strings;
>>
>> - ‘hosts-file’ and ‘mingetty-service’ (#:motd argument) want a
>> 'text-file' monadic procedure;
>>
>> - some other services (‘syslog-service’, ‘lirc-service’, ...) want file
>> names (of the configuration files).
>
> In reality they take a “file”, not a file name. A file is an object
> that within a gexp expands to a file name. So it can be a ‘local-file’
> object, a derivation, etc.
Ah, thanks! I didn't realize that ‘local-file’ or a derivation may be
used there.
>> As for me, I prefer the latter variant. But I think the best would
>> be to add support for any of the above possibilities for all services
>> or operating-system fields.
>
> An important criterion is whether the file needs to contain references
> to store items or not. For ‘sudoers’ and ‘issue’, that’s normally not
> the case, and these are usually small files or computable files, so I
> think it’s fine to use strings here (more convenient than files.)
Well, I don't agree about ‘sudoers’. It may be a really big file. Mine
is not so big, but it is 40 lines long (including some useful comments),
so I have to use some additional guile code to convert the contents of
the file into string.
> Using monadic values as for ‘hosts-file’ and #:motd is not nice. These
> should be changed to use either a string or a file.
>
> The best would be to always use a file-like object. I’ve just added
> ‘plain-file’ for that reason. Now I would change #:motd and
> ‘hosts-file’ to take a file-like object rather than a monadic value.
>
> WDYT?
I beg a pardon, but if I inderstand it correctly (probably not), I don't
see a difference from the user point of view. Previously it was:
(hosts-file (text-file "hosts" "..."))
and now it would be:
(hosts-file (plain-file "hosts" "..."))
> This brings up the question of how far we should go on the declarative
> side: Similar to ‘local-file’ and ‘plain-file’, should we add more
> declarative types, say for ‘gexp->derivation’?
>
> My current inclination would be to not add anything beyond ‘local-file’
> and ‘plain-file’: These two are useful in OS configurations, so that’s
> fine, but for more elaborate things people should just use the
> procedural interface. Thoughts?
I think I'm not competent as I have a vague understanding of all this
stuff and of user's needs (except mine ☺). What I would like to have,
is a possibility to specify my configuration files for various services
and operating-system fields. I don't want to write text configs in my
os-config.scm file (as it happens now with ‘hosts-file’).
I'm very happy with the current behaviour of ‘syslog-service’,
‘lirc-service’ and ‘console-keymap-service’ where I just specify file
names, e.g.:
(syslog-service #:config-file "/home/me/my-favourite-syslog.conf")
and I like this ↑ way of specifying configurations very much! That's
what I would like to see in ‘sudoers’ and ‘hosts-file’ fields.
--
Thanks,
Alex
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system', Alex Kost, 2015/06/02
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system', Ludovic Courtès, 2015/06/03
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system',
Alex Kost <=
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system', Ludovic Courtès, 2015/06/05
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system', Alex Kost, 2015/06/05
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system', Ludovic Courtès, 2015/06/05
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system', Alex Kost, 2015/06/06
- bug#20720: Inconsistency in text fields for 'operating-system', Ludovic Courtès, 2015/06/07