base-files revisited

[John Morrison]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2019 at 17:56, Achim Gratz wrote:

> John Morrison writes:
> > I've been asked at work to get the standard base-files extended with
> > specifics for the company I work for and wondered if this would be a good
> > time to revisit how the .bashrc file in particular is put together.
>

<snip original thoughts/>


> Been there, done that.  You'll end up providing one or more company
> specific packages either as an overlay repository or merged into a local
> mirror repository.


The company won't allow anything to be installed directly from the internet.
We were going to create a local mirror repo of the things which are allowed
to be installed along with a 'package script' which will call setup with
the appropriate commands.

The company specifics we were planning to have as another, separate, local
'mirror' and get setup to merge them. It works, not very pretty though. If
you know of a better strategy I'm all ears!


> That is unless you only have a handful of users that
> either can and actually do follow instructions or you can handhold them
> during their installations.


They don't get a choice, although we might open the default mirror up
sufficiently for folks to request specific additional packages added to the
installation. Best we're allowed to offer.


> If you provide a company config package all
> you need to do is make sure it gets installed last (or arrange for the
> postinstall to do all the work and move that to a late place).  Once
> you've replaced the default files setup (or rather the respective
> postinstalls) will keep them untouched.
>

I didn't think about installed last... I could get the postinstall to
append to the actual files (/etc/defaults/skel or /etc/skel) directly...
hum.
The base-files-<company> package was already adding some additional
/etc/skel/.rc files, what I really wanted was a way of adding the to
/etc/skel/.bashrc and /etc/skel/.inputrc so that might work.  I think some
defaults for mintty were mentioned as well (we have fairly high spec
monitors and everyone ends up boosting the font size).


> > I was also thinking of taking some more of the sample from
> > https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/sample-bashrc.html, for example the
> > colours and some more of the aliases and adding them into the existing
> sets.
>
> None of that strikes me as desirable to enable by default.
>
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > I think Achim Gratz took over the base-files from me. Achim, are you
> still
> > around? Open for a discussion?
>
> Tentatively, I'd say what you want to do doesn't belong into base-files.
> That is supposed to provide a clean starting point (mostly to work
> around some quirks of how Windows leaves your environment) and treat all
> POSIX shells the same to the extent possible, not create even more
> differences than there are out of the gate.  There already are hooks in
> profile to enable your own scripting if that's what you want and
> anything that is purely bash-specific would need to go into its own
> package anyway.
>

Fair enough :)

Thanks for the thoughts.

J.

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