I get your point, but I consider every setting in /etc specific to
Debian, but yet allowed and suggested to be changed by the user.

Note, we don't distinguish between settings supposed to be changed by
users and those considered a distribution specific detail. Of course it
does not make too much sense to change things like the pidfile setup,
but on the other hand, that's totally left to the user and we should
support that.

I have no problem with supporting it, but likewise I think segregating it would be useful too without introducing any limitations. For example, while unlikely, if Debian decides that all pidfiles should now go into /tmp instead, all users will have to examine lighttpd.conf and merge in the change. Those people using a configuration management system like Puppet won't get to see dpkg's nice output, and will have to merge the changes by hand in their repos and push them out to all their machines.

But if the options were in debian.conf instead, 99% of users won't have modified it so it will be updated automatically, even for Puppet users. Those who have changed these options are the ones who need to examine the change, and that will happen as expected if they've modified that .conf file.

Also I am pretty sure, whatever we choose, some other users will
disagree and fine some other partitioning more useful.

That's true, but my argument is that you shouldn't impede progress just in case someone might come along with a better idea one day :-) I realise you don't want to keep changing things, but to be honest, if each change is backwards compatible then you are incrementally improving things, which is always good.

Well, you realize you still have to have something like "include
debian.conf" in the main lighttpd.conf which would hardly be the same on
all Linux distributions?

It would if you called it "platform.conf" instead :-) But to be honest the issue is not about distro-specific tweaks, the problem is when you have to duplicate options that may be changed with a package upgrade. I can put in my Puppet config "if distro is debian, include debian.conf" and then forget about it, and it doesn't matter if Debian move the pidfile path or some other platform-level change. As long as the package manager will overwrite my unmodified debian.conf as needed, I don't need to care about the change.

So, to summarize: you want:

/etc/ligttpd/lighttpd.conf:
   + include debian.conf
   + include default.conf
   + include_the_conf_enabled_stuff

debian.conf: distribution specific settings (pidfile, user name?)
default.conf: everything else

Yes, exactly. Ideally (perhaps except for the document-root) you should be able to move default.conf unchanged between Debian and other distros and have it just work.

Cheers,
Adam.



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