[csw-maintainers] FreeRADIUS and it's baroque configuration

[Geoff Davis]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if I can get a little advice on how best to handle the 
FreeRADIUS package. This package has been abandoned, and there are quite 
a few requests for a version bump. I've got a new set of packages 
sitting in experimental, but I'm battling it's baroque configuration files.

FreeRADIUS is similar in complexity to Apache - there are a ton of ways 
to configure it, and no one site is going to do it the same way. The 
source archive includes a complicated initial configuration, which was 
evidently written by multiple people. It's huge: 109 separate files in 
this example configuration, plus 8 symlinks.

It uses two different methods for enabling and disabling functionality. 
There is a sites-available/sites-enabled approach like Apache, which 
plays ok with CSWpreserveconf. The other method is far more traditional 
directory containing various modules, without an easy way to 
enable/disable them. CSWpreserveconf doesn't like this setup at all and 
puts in a bunch of foo and foo.CSW files, which results in the 
configuration for "foo" getting effectively included twice.

Since this package is complex to configure, the example configuration is 
ridiculously huge, and I'm not quite sure what a default use case for it 
would be, I'm tempted to just ship it without a working configuration at 
all, and let the user copy the example configuration down from 
/opt/csw/share/doc/CSWfreeradius/exampleconf or something similar.

Is shipping this package with an example config not installed in 
/etc/opt/csw OK to do? I seem to remember seeing a document on the wiki 
somewhere claming something to that effect - probably one of the 
auto-start daemon options, but no real formal guidance.