Conffiles and possible conffiles

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi,

on the debian-tetex-maint mailing list we often have problems to decide
which of the thousands of TeX input files should be treated as
configuration files - in principle, each of them can be changed in order
to change the behavior of the system.  We are currently thinking about a
solution were there would be hardly any conffiles[1], but a local admin
could put copies of any file he likes into subdirectories of /etc/texmf.
This would shadow the dpkg-shipped file in /usr/share/texmf and allow
configuration.  And of course we would document this.

There is one major drawback, however: If a file that has a (changed)
copy in /etc/texmf is changed in the deb, the user gets no notification.
This is at least annoying - but on the other hand, many users have newer
or changed versions in /usr/local/share/texmf or in $HOME/texmf, and
they face the same problem.

What do others think? Would it be acceptable Policy-wise to handle
configuration like this?

Regards, Frank


[1] The configuration file snippets in /etc/texmf/*.d/ would be kept, as
well as configuration files for tetex-bin's programs.
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer