How well does Gentoo manage program settings?

gntu · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 41

I'm curious to what extent do ebuild scripts try to maintain a consistent policy regarding where settings for programs/packages are stored and how the config files are named?

How does the package management system deal with user-defined settings when packages are updated/removed?

Can/do ebuild scripts try to choose in some instances reasonable defaults for some settings?

I'm just curious how well Gentoo manages on this front as I make the transition from Debian.

Lycander · Guru Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 468

Settings and config files are usually up to the programs to create and maintain themselves, not the package management system. Generally speaking, Gentoo keeps programs and their source the way the author intended them to be. Like KDE for example, it would be as if you installed the package you download directly from KDE's website, as the authors intended it and not custom menus and what not like in major distros (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE).

For a while now, Portage has a behavior where if it finds an existing config file, it won't overwrite the existing one and just rename the new one with 0001 appended to it. The user may run "etc-update" and it's a handy tool to determine what config files need to be examined, does a line by line comparison and you can choose what action to take (keep the existing config, overwrite the old with the new, or go thru it line by line and hand pick the changes).

gntu · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 41

I just read about the "config protection" option, which appears to be a step in the right direction.

On the other hand I hadn't run across the etc-update script, so thanks for the heads-up.

All in all, gentoo's "config file management" appears to be less sophisticated than Debian's, which is not necessarily a bad thing, since I never cared much for debconf. I kind of like the idea of keeping a package as close as possible to the way the developers intended/released it.

Lycander · Guru Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 468

In a terminal do "emerge --help config" and it'll pring out the help text with more details of what I described above and it even mentions the etc-update thingy. Whenever you emerge something that tries to update config files, portage will print a warning after emerging and inform you that some config files need to be updated and it tells you to "emerge --help config" to learn more.