Re: /etc/mailname
On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Brian Mays wrote:
> > Honestly, I think that every file, or at least sub-directory
> > tree root, should be owned by a package, except in very select
> > circumstances. There must be good reasons for it not being so, but
> > it's protection if nothing else. If you've claimed it, you have the
> > authority and responsibility to mandate how it may be used by other
> > packages if they want to use it. Without such ownership, we're very
> > much into the realm of 'common use', which is fine as far as it goes,
> > but it doesn't stretch as far as we'd like.
>
> Your realm of "common use" extends to the whole system; it is the entire
> reason that we work so hard to put together a distribution that is well
> integrated. The concept of staking out territory in the filesystem
> never really occurred to me. I always assumed that developers would
> work together, not against each other.
OK, so if there is a file used by a package but not owned by it, how do I
find out that a package already uses that file? It's not mentioned in the
package, but the package uses it. Now, being a good developer, I check the
file name over w.d.o/distrib/packages and nothing comes up, so I assume it's
available. I define how I'm going to store it. Now, a package I don't use
uses the same filename in a different format, and oh! all of a sudden I've
broken the file for that other package. Why? Because it didn't tell me it
wanted it.
I'm well into the realm of hypotheticals here (AFAIK it's never happened in
Debian), so feel free to casually dismiss me if you like. But I still think
that in general it's better if a file (or directory hierarchy, in the case
of say /var/lib/dpkg) is owned by someone rather than just assuming that
it'll be there and what you think it is.
--
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#include <disclaimer.h>
Matthew Palmer
mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au
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