Ludovic Courtès (2015-06-05 15:30 +0300) wrote:
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> Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès (2015-06-03 12:52 +0300) wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>>> 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.
>
> Ah, good point. So let’s turn ‘sudoers’ into a file-like object.
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>>> 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" "..."))
>
> Right. But it could also be:
>
> (hosts-file (local-file "/home/foo/my-hosts-file.txt"))
>
> This form is pleasant when the file can be long or when it has special
> syntax and you’d rather use the editor’s syntax highlighting.
Ah, This is great! Thank you.
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>> 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’).
>
> OK. So that’s definitely in favor of using file-like objects pretty
> much everywhere.
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>> 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.
>
> OK. Note that this form (directly using a local file name) works
> somewhat by chance and should not be used because it defeats
> reproducibility. That is, your OS configuration actually depends on
> that file in /home, which may be modified or deleted anytime, thereby
> changing the syslogd behavior in unpredicable ways.
Yes, that's exactly what I want! I realize the benefits of the
reproducibility but often I just want my system to depend on
/home/... files that can be modified anytime.
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> The right thing to do is:
>
> (syslog-service #:config-file
> (local-file "/home/me/my-favourite-syslog.conf"))
>
> This means that the config file is automatically added to the store and
> made part of the closure of the OS config. Now if
> "/home/me/my-favourite-syslog.conf" is removed/modified, the OS behavior
> remains unchanged.
And that's exactly what I don't want! I don't want my config files to
be put into the store. Because I have to reconfigure the system to see
the changes. With my current unpredicable way, I can change my
syslog.conf and the next time I boot into the same system, I will face
the changes I made.
I realize that it sounds like a strange whim and is not what is supposed
to be done, but, well, I just like it :-)
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> I’ll prepare a patch for that and report back.
Thank you, in spite of all I said earlier, I really like ‘local-file’!
--
Alex
