Re: Bug#29770: Policy contradicts itself about /etc/aliases
Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Please explain the rationale for this. As long as user changes
> are preserved, why should a program designed to modify a conffile not
> modify it?
I was using "conffile" to mean anything registered as a conffile with dpkg -
just to make sure we have our terminology straight.
I thought we had had long ago decided that things like postinsts and so on
should not modify conffiles so dpkg won't confuse the user later by
prompting when those conffiles changed. But I don't see anything about this
in policy so I guess I'm mistaken.
> Especially if the design philosophy is that the original
> file installed with the package shall never change, and the modifier
> be always used to optionally effect non-local changes.
That's fine as a philosohpy, but it doesn't hold up very well in practice
(ie, there are always bugs, even in conffiles, and file formats do change
over time).
--
see shy jo
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