Re: It's Huntin' Season
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> Thomas> some sysadmin might want to hexedit ls to behave a little
> Thomas> differently; isn't it good to "give the sysadmin the choice",
> Thomas> and thus mark it a conffile?
>
> I am getting rather tired of ludicrous strawmen.
Well, I've said it *isn't* a strawman, and you might want to call me a
liar, but please don't.
You've given some bright-line principles, and applied them to emacs,
and said "so by these bright-line principles, the files must be
conffiles". I'm presenting a counterexample--one that looks
outrageous (of course) so that it's as clear as the noonday sun that
the bright-line principles are the wrong ones. If the principles
argue that even /bin/ls should be a conffile (as they do imply), then
they are the wrong principles.
> Thomas> The real issue, of course, is whether they should be forced to be
> Thomas> conffiles. Obviously some must be conffiles.
>
> They certainly are not forced to be conffiles. Indeed, psgml,
> vm, and gnus, the three emacs packages I maintain, are now preserving
> user changes, and have no conffiles at all.
Sure, if you want to substitute "must preserve all user changes" for
"conffiles" in what I write, go ahead; I'm not trying to be
pointlessly precise about the things we agree on.
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