On Mon, Apr 06, 1998 at 05:14:56PM +0200, Santiago Vila Doncel wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > What I'd like to propose, therefore, is extending the "conffile" label
> > to cover all configuration files.
> Why do you want to do that?
So I can get a list of what files in /etc are meant to be there, and what
aren't.
In particular, I'd like to be able to generate a list of things like
/etc/.pwd.lock
/etc/X11/XF86Config.old
/etc/conf.modules.dpkg-dist
/etc/cron.monthly/apache
/etc/crontab.dpkg-old
/etc/deity
/etc/deity/sources.list.dist
/etc/elvis
/etc/ftpd/ftpaccess.dpkg-dist
/etc/group-
/etc/gshadow-
/etc/init.d/boot.OLD
/etc/init.d/linuxlogo.dpkg-old
/etc/init.d/netstd_misc.dpkg-old
/etc/init.d/network
/etc/issue.dpkg-dist
/etc/lynx.cfg.dpkg-dist
/etc/majordomo.cf.dpkg-dist
/etc/manpath.config.bak
/etc/news/innfeed.conf.OLD
/etc/passwd-
/etc/ppp/ip-down.d/fetchmail.dpkg-old
/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/fetchmail.dpkg-old
/etc/services.dpkg-old
/etc/sgml.catalog.old
/etc/shadow-
/etc/squid.conf.dpkg-dist
/etc/zshenv.dpkg-old
that either have been left by old packages (that have quite possibly
been debugged since), or created by the sysadmin, but aren't being
taken care of any more. Note that the above is just a first pass of
files in my /etc directory that didn't seem likely to be serving a
purpose, it's quite possibly not a complete sample by any means.
Without some sort of list of files a package is likely to end up with
in /etc, I can't see any way of doing generating such lists reliably.
Extending conffiles in that way seemed like a good idea. It still
doesn't seem wildly unreasonable even if non-/etc files can be conffiles.
> Why should I want to be asked each time I upgrade the system because of
> local files like /etc/init.d/networks, /etc/timezone, /etc/papersize
> or /etc/gpm.conf, to name a few?
I was expecting that in extending dpkg to cope with conffiles not present
in the .deb, that the behaviour for such files would be "silently ignore".
> A configuration file is a conffile when the package maintainer decided
> to let dpkg to handle it via the conffile mechanism.
> Is there anything wrong with the above definition?
It doesn't help me find out what files aren't being taken care of anymore.
Once again, if anyone can offer alternate solutions, I'd be most
appreciative.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``It's not a vision, or a fear. It's just a thought.''
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