Re: [Help-gnunet] mysql database setup

[David Kuehling]

>>>>> "Christian" == Christian Grothoff <address@hidden> writes:

> First of all, sorry for the very late reply ;-).

No problem.  I mostly wasn't reading email anyways :)

> If you want to improve the online documentation, checkout the
> GNUnet-docs/WWW/ directory and e-mail me diffs, I'll be happy to put
> improvements on-line ;-).

Well, my argument wasn't so much that the documentation is bad or
insufficient, it's more like that there is so much of it users have to
read :)

>> Well, I actually wanted to auto-delete those things, but I did not
>> want to parse the config file from a shell script.  Asking the user
>> to manually delete was more like a todo entry so people like you can
>> comment on how that could be done right :)

> Well, deletion could be easily done in a shell script with a line like
> this:

> cat old-config-file | grep -v "the line to delete" > new-config-file

What I meant was deletion of the bloomfilter and other files in
$GNUNETD_HOME/state.sdb.  For this you need to read the value of
GNUNETD_HOME, which means you need a config file parser that works
*excactly* like the parser used by gnunetd.  Having two seperate parser
(one in shell script, on in C), with subtly different behaviour looks
like a asking for problems.

>> Making this part of gnunet-update would not allow deletion of
>> databases?  If this were part of a Debian package, than complete
>> removal of the package should also remove the database.

> With --purge, yes.  gnunet-update could remove DBs -- given
> permission.  Naturally, doing it in the .deb properly maybe better.

>> Given your comments, I would propose the following:
>> 
>> Add a new binary program to GNUnet: 'gnunet-mysql' (or similar name),
>> that does what the shell script does, but uses GNUnet's config file
>> parser to read and update the config file and
>> [..]

> I'm not sure if we strictly need a new binary (gnunet-mysql) or if
> (given some reasonable C code) we should not integrate this into
> gnunet-update.  But the idea is fine.

Yes, adding functionality to gnunet-update might help to avoid duplicate
code.

>> Any chance that mysql can be made the default for Debian/Ubuntu
>> packages?

> Again, that's Daniel's call, I see advantages and disadvantages to
> either approach (and I don't know how one would give the user the
> choice while keeping the (Debian) maintainers sane ;-) ).

One way would be to provide two packages gnunet-database-mysql and
gnunet-database-sqlite with dependencies used to enforce that only one
is installed.  This also has the nice side-effect that only the needed
shared objects (libgnunetmodule_sqstore_*.so etc.) are installed.

If a user wants to clear his database he could just purge and reinstall
the gnunet-database-mysql package, without needing a full reinstall of
gnunet (which would also remove the config files he still needs).

This could be quite intuitive for Debian and Ubuntu users.

Anyway, I'll try to find some time in may or june to work on
gnunet-update and will try to not touch the packaging stuff for now.

David
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