Bug#189370: acknowledged by developer (irrelevant)
On Fri, 2003-04-18 at 00:08, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
> Of course I can understand that it is possible to destroy
> local changes as I wrote in a former email.
Ok, well, policy is quite clear this isn't allowed.
But let me say first that this is not to belittle your work on tetex;
I'm very glad you're working on it.
> It breaks Policy to some extent but follows it to some
> extent, IMHO.
>
> Former tetex packages provided language.dat as a
> conffile so if one changed (manually!) it then one would
> be asked whether to replace it or not everytime at upgrading.
>
> I changed it a configuration file which would be generated
> in postints (of tetex-base) and adopted debconf so that
> a user can select to modify it or not with debconf.
But the dpkg prompt was there for a reason; to preserve user changes.
Your change may seem like an improvement, and in some ways it is. But
again, using Debconf is not a license to overwrite the file.
> > It does break policy. There is no question. And I think policy is
> > correct. If you don't think it is, the right way to solve the problem
> > is to discuss the issue here on -devel.
>
> I guess it depends on how to read Policy, in a sense.
"
11.7.3. Behavior
----------------
Configuration file handling must conform to the following behavior:
* local changes must be preserved during a package upgrade [...]"
Seems quite clear to me. After that is a discussion about how to do
things correctly.
> For example, updmap was once a conffile and was in
> /etc/texmf/dvips but the current teTeX upstream (so tetex
> packages of Debian also) changed it completely and now
> updmap is a normal script (in /usr/bin) and read configuration
> file /etc/texmf/updmap.cfg, that is, former updmap was
> splitted into updmap and updmap.cfg. Further its format
> of configuration was changed completely.
I'm not sure how this updmap thing relates to what we're talking about.
> Perhaps our handling at present will be not *perfectly*
> compliant with Policy (I think it is compliant with Policy but,
> at least, there are some who think not) but is there *perfect*
> way to handle this?
Yes, there is. See below:
> Though I didn't check this yet but if I (or some other tetex
> members) can understand it and find it useful for us then
> tetex packages will adopt it but if not (and if the current
> handling really breaks Policy), is it the only way to get
> back to the former scheme?
Well, it seems you're really not convinced Policy is being violated
here. That's understandable I guess. I am hoping other people here
will weigh in with their opinion.
Any policy editors?
> I have an impression that such Policy understanding prevents
> sane advance of packages.
Well, the solution might be to change policy. In the interim, I think
my fontconfig approach is fairly good (although it certainly could be
improved). That's why this thread is being CC'd to -devel, so we can
come to a consensus about this issue.
Having some packages prompt for "manage with debconf" all in different
ways and with different warnings in the config files and different
defaults is most definitely a bad thing.
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