Re: imp blows away hand-edited changes...
On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 04:34:59AM -0700, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:
> > > The package does follow policy in this manner.
> >
> > no it doesn't. in fact, imp is breaking policy because
> > /etc/imp/defaults.php3 is not in the package and therefore does not
> > belong to imp.
>
> ok...I never looked at it this way...I looked at it from the point
> that IMP builds it and thus it's IMP's.
practically, that's close to true. according to policy, it's not true.
realistically, every configuration file belongs to the system admin
and MUST NOT be automatically overwritten without permission.
if you absolutely must overwrite a configuration file then do it using
a textfile template and allow the system admin to modify the template
(e.g. sendmail.cf is generated from the sendmail.mc template - hand
edited changes to sendmail.cf can be lost, but anything changed in the
sendmail.mc template will be kept). as long as this kind of thing is
well documented, it is OK.
> I've also looked at it from the future of IMP's standpoint where all
> configuration will be done through IMP eventually and I've been trying
> to work in that direction.
this sounds gross. i hope it will still be possible to configure
imp with vi and not force people to use some clumsy web-browser
interface - even the best of web interfaces is clumsy compared to
your-favourite-text-editor<tm>.
> I didn't want to do everything needed first just to have a
> ton of possible things to troubleshoot. I wanted to do it in
> stages...apparantly that was the wrong way to do it.
not necessarily, in fact that's often a good way of doing things - it
depends on how safe those stages were. the stage you released was not
safe, so should not have been released.
> tis ok...I'll revert to the old methods and come up with some other way
> to do this.
cool.
btw, i'm not trying to flame you or anything...it's just that this issue
is very serious - config files are sacred, especially when they have
been hand-edited by the system admin.
craig
--
craig sanders
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