Re: texmf.cnf again
On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 20:13:04 +0200, Marcelo E Magallon <mmagallo@debian.org> said:
> I have asked the maintainer to make update-texmf check for that
> signature, which at the moment it does not. That reasonably covers
> this scenario: if Manoj blindly replaces the file by his own
> hand-rolled version the fingerprint won't be there and the file
> won't be overwritten. If someone else just opens the file and
> edits it, he'll see the comment (which hopefully will be updated to
> reflect the fact that if the comment is not there the file won't be
> touched) and either remove the comment or edit
> /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf/99_local. Now you are going to tell me the
> user might scroll past the comment without ever reading it.
I just read a changelog entry by adam di carlo saying that his
package broke, since there were changes that needed to go in, but the
user was never asked -- since at some point in the dim mists of time
they had elected to not have their hand crafted texmf.cf blown away.
This actually is something I would consider an important bug
-- when the maintainer holds the users up to hostage as to either
accept the maintainers control over the configuration file (in
violation of Debian policy), or be relegated to a ghetto where no
upstream change is ever shown to the user.
This is in strict opposition to Debian practice where such
upstream changes are offered to the user, and the user may use diff
to examine the changges, and either accept or reject them, perhaps to
later manually patch bits in.
This degradation of the quality of implementation just to
never ask the user questions at install time makes the current TeTeX
packages, in my opinion, suck.
manoj
--
I'd rather push my Harley than ride a rice burner.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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