Bug#509117: Can I overwrite a file in /etc?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 07:36:31PM +0200, Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 04:44:28PM +0100, Frédéric Boiteux wrote:
> > I've used the '--save' command of setupcon to save it to disk (in 
> > /etc/console-setup/boottime.kmap.gz and now, these boot scripts run very quickly, 
> > and bootchart tells me I gained 9 seconds :-)
> > 
> > Perhaps a mechanism could be added to save config or suggest it ?
> 
> Setupcon uses /etc/console-setup/boottime.kmap.gz only if it is not older than the 
> configuration file /etc/default/console-setup.  If it is older this means the 
> keymap has to be regenerated.
> 
> In order to avoid future time consuming regenerations, setupcon has to overwrite 
> boottime.kmap.gz.  But this file is situated in /etc so accordingly to the policy 
> it is a configuration file and may not be overwriten without administrator's 
> knowledge.
> 
> I'd like to ask if I can make an exception for this case.  The standard solution -- 
> move boottime.kmap.gz from /etc to /var -- is not available because setupcon must 
> be able to work when /var is not yet mounted.

I think this would be fine. It's effectively a cache of another
configuration file, and I would expect it to be fairly rare to fiddle
with /etc/console-setup/boottime.kmap.gz directly, given its format.

I definitely agree that the boot speed changes are worth it.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]