Re: Configuration DB
On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 12:28:42PM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 08:43:04AM +1000, Cameron Hutchison wrote:
> > Once upon a time Jason Rennie said...
> > > On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 02:09:08AM -0700, Brian Nelson wrote:
> > > > The debconf database is nothing more than a temporary cache of answers
> > > > gotten from the user. Debconf will regenerate this data by asking any
> > > > questions it needs to.
> > >
> > > If the Debian designers had this attitude, everything would go into
> > > /var/cache:
> > >
> > > What, you want to run oowriter? Oops, just deleted that from my
> > > cache. Downloading openoffice.org-bin.deb from www.debian.org.
> > > Please wait.
> >
> > Worse than that. All configuration files could be stored in /var/cache
> > with this logic, since vi can just regenerate this data by getting you to
> > type it in again.
> >
> > As I see it, if debconf is asking you the questions again, *it* is not
> > regenerating the data, but *you* are.
> >
>
> I've looked at the contents of /var/cache/debconf on my machine. I
> can't make out what it really contains. It certainly doesn't seem to
> contain the answers that I gave to configuration questions during
> package installation.
$ grep Value: /var/cache/debconf/config.dat
are all answers you either gave or debconf gave defaults for (depending
on your debconf priority setting).
> As I said in a earlier post, if you are concerned that it *does* contain
> information that should be checkpointed, you can move it to /etc and
> either put a softlink in /var/cache, or edit /etc/debconf.conf to point
> to its new location within /etc
>
> Someone who mistrusts the design of debconf might try renaming
> /var/cache/debconf to /var/cache/hide.debconf and see what happens.
> Is a new /var/cache/debconf created automatically?
You should never remove directories in /var/cache. Files must be
regenerated, but directories do not need to be, so something may break
if you do.
See
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARCACHEAPPLICATIONCACHEDATA
--
You win again, gravity!
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