config files for alternatives? about chkconfig HOT 6 OPEN

It makes sense. I have been thinking about rewriting alternatives to make them more modern, and I even have requirements from other teams as well. The problem is that it was always pretty low on my todo list.

I will try to find someone on our team who would be willing to work on this.

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@wgwoods @lnykryn how do I file a request with upstream? In particular nss and p11-kit-trust ?

Is upstream aware of your intended changes or are they going to view these requests as WTF? for the time being ?

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@wgwoods The config file idea seems interesting, but why make it compact instead of something more like systemd units (INI-/ConfigParser- style)? That way it's easy to understand and configure.

(also, cc: @thkukuk who is interested in this for openSUSE MicroOS)

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I like the idea, but there are some problems, especially with atomic updates as used by different distributions in different implementations, but maybe also with updating configuration files.
Please make sure:

1. user made overrides/changes should not be stored in the distribution provided configuration file, but in another place. Else updating and merging changes done by admin and distribution can become a pain.
2. Don't store distribution provided default configuration files in /etc, there only the changes by the admin should be stored. Makes updating and merging of configuration files, especially with atomic updates, much easier.
   So distributions should store their configuration file in e.g. /usr/share/alternatives.conf.d, which could be read-only, the user made changes should be stored in /etc/alternatives.conf.d and the application merges them at runtime.

For more background and ideas, please look at: https://github.com/thkukuk/atomic-updates_and_etc/blob/master/README.md

If we get this seperated and solved nicely, I will make sure that openSUSE will switch to this alternatives solution. And if we find a more ini style format, SUSE is currently developing a C library to merge such config files for applications, we are currently discussing the requirements of dnf for it with the developers.

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@wgwoods @lnykryn friendly ping... Anyone have any idea when this might be tackled?

There's now a library for handling the config file overrides and layering similar to systemd, called libeconf. This is packaged in Fedora already, so this could make it much easier for implementing this.

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@Conan-Kudo Well, a lot of people have this on their "when I have some free time" list for years. So I don't expect that this will be done anytime soon.

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