From owner-freebsd-current Thu Feb 20 18:39:40 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5144D37B401 for ; Thu, 20 Feb 2003 18:39:39 -0800 (PST) Received: from rwcrmhc51.attbi.com (rwcrmhc51.attbi.com [204.127.198.38]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BEB7043F93 for ; Thu, 20 Feb 2003 18:39:38 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from julian@elischer.org) Received: from interjet.elischer.org (12-232-168-4.client.attbi.com[12.232.168.4]) by rwcrmhc51.attbi.com (rwcrmhc51) with ESMTP id <20030221023936051007ehc3e>; Fri, 21 Feb 2003 02:39:36 +0000 Received: from localhost (localhost.elischer.org [127.0.0.1]) by InterJet.elischer.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id SAA44934 for ; Thu, 20 Feb 2003 18:39:35 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 18:39:33 -0800 (PST) From: Julian Elischer To: FreeBSD current users Subject: config files and includes. Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I have just gone through the process of upgrading or installing several hundred machines, and Thst includes altering or editing many config files in /etc. I like the way that rc.conf is handled, in that defaults/rc.comf can be updated and only the local changes live in r.conf. I wish that more files had this capability. For example syslogd.conf or newsyslog.conf are updated between releases but they are also prime candidates for local additions. What would be really cool is if more config files could do 'includes' so that you could have a syslogd.local.conf wher eall your local entries could be. In addition you could make it look in /usr/local/etc/syslogd.conf for loging requirments for packages. To do this for every config file would be a lot of work. I do wonder however whether there couldn't be some "config-file reader" library routine that could be used to pre-pass files and do inclusions.. if the interface was very similar to what is usually used (people tend to either use open/read/close or fopen/fscanf (etc). equivalent calls could be made that use a stream of data that is pre-processed to do inclusions etc. That would making retrofitting relatively easy. Programs that use yacc/lex ar emore difficult, but I haven't looked into it.. anyhow, that was just a thought. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message