Re: Conffiles and possible conffiles

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> writes:

> 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

I think other packages have the same problem, gconf comes to mind, and
they should sit together and work out a common solution.

It would be nice to notify the user about changes in the default
config and give the choice of a diff or 3 way merge. Maybe this is
something that could be added to ucf (e.g. option
--modified-file=/etc/texmf/foo) and then present the user with the
same options and frontend as with normal config files.

MfG
        Goswin