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Re: /etc/sysconf ? /etc/<somethingelse> ?



Lukas Nellen writes [ SuperCite undone - iwj ]:
> > Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> writes:
> > Many packages are finding themselves in need of a directory to place
> > one or two small files which are read by initialisation scripts.
...
> 
> What exactly is supposed to go into that directory?

This is a very good question :-).

The existence of the directory is being driven by two related
problems.  One is that many of the /etc/init.d and other scripts in
/etc have much configuration coded into them; this means that to
modify (say) the list of filesystems excluded from the daily cron jobs
you have to modify the script and take the prompting from dpkg each
time.  The key characteristic of these config files is that they're
configuration for scripts which are themselves in /etc.

The other is that many packages' postinst scripts want somewhere to
store overall configuration parameters so that they can share them.
/etc/papersize is an example of this.  They key characteristic of
these config files is that updating them may not affect packages until
they are purged and reinstalled, because they are only read by
packages' scripts.  Of course it's better if they can be read at run
time by the programs being invoked, but this can sometimes be hard
(for example, when different programs have different config file
formats, and the package postinst scripts copy the data between them).

Perhaps we should have two directories
  /etc/scriptconf
  /etc/installconf
?

Ian.


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