[Freedombox-discuss] Kerberos and remctl instead of exmachina?

[Nick Daly]

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 4:57 AM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> Quoting Tim Retout (2013-09-03 09:31:20)
>> The debian-edu project handles more complex configuration using
>> cfengine - if they found it necessary, I suspect this project will. (I
>> believe Petter might know more about this than me.)
>
> Goal of Debian Edu is minimizing system administration to 1 hour per
> week (or some such number).  FreedomBox must have *zero* administration.
>
> Therefore I see debconf as the *only* possibility we have: Debian
> package maintainers *must* support the configurations that we need for
> FreedomBox, as there are noone else between them and the
> (non-technical!) user.

Jonas, I wish you had made that clarification years ago.  FWIW, I
think you're right, which makes me a little bit sad, because the
FreedomBoxiness of a particular package then becomes yet another
unfunded mandate on upstream's or the packager's time (it starts to
sound like SPDX).  That's a hard bargain, socially.  Nonetheless, it
does seem to validate the approach of experimenting with the system to
see what configuration options are actually required.  This is why the
TODO list has all the packaging and configuration steps in the 2.0
release: so we can poke at the system before asking devs to implement
features or accept patches.

Nick