#4856 The installer should support defaults file and both --no* and --enable* forms for all boolean options
Opened by adelton. Modified

When installing IPA server in certain environments like containers, some defaults might need to be different, while giving the admin a way to modify them for their particular deployment. There should be a defaults file where the packager/vendor would set the generic defaults, and admin should be able to override the default in both ways.

Take the NTP as an example -- it's defined in the code

    basic_group.add_option("-N", "--no-ntp", dest="conf_ntp", action="store_false",
                      help="do not configure ntp", default=True)

so the user can disable it. But what if we want to have it disabled as a general rule for containerized deployment, while giving the admin a chance to actually enable it? We'd need to come up with some extra parameters specific to invocation of the container (docker run command taking some environment variables, for example), rather than just configuring that the default is {{{--no-ntp}}} and giving the admin standard way, to override it back, like {{{--enable-ntp}}}.

Similar behaviour should be possible for all boolean options of all installers.


This should be kept in mind during 4.2 installer refactoring. If options are indeed generated from Param-type in modules, changing the default should be possible.

Processing 4.2 backlog. This ticket was found as something that is not a priority for the nearest releases.

But as usual, please feel free to discuss your use cases or contribute patches, to make that happen sooner!

Metadata Update from @adelton:
- Issue assigned to jcholast
- Issue set to the milestone: Future Releases

Metadata