mailcap stress (was: Potato fresh install)
On Mon 13 Mar 2000, Santiago Vila wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Paul Slootman wrote:
>
> > Also, when upgrading mime-support, it always offers to replace the
> > conffile /etc/mailcap, which is NEVER a smart thing to do. Maybe
> > /etc/mailcap should be one of the base files, and not part of
> > mime-support?
>
> This is Bug #34294, which I reported more than a year ago and it has not
> been fixed yet.
>
> Glad to know I'm not the only one to think this is a bug. I have tried to
> convince the maintainer (Brian White) several times about the need to
> change this, without much success. He says "/etc/mailcap almost never
> changes" and he does not see the need to modify the way /etc/mailcap is
> handled.
That's strange, as I've been asked whether to replace it on numerous
occasions during upgrades to the current potato (every month or so).
Maybe the conffile mechanism doesn't always work properly? Or was I
confused... (it's been known to happen :-)
Ans it still doesn't address the situation where packages are being
configured but mime-support isn't yet.
> If this is not a bug in mime-support, then lots of packages would be
> violating policy because they modify /etc/printcap ("a configuration file
You mean /etc/mailcap I hope
> of another package") every time they register their MIME viewers...
Well, if they do it with update-mime it should be OK (unless
mime-support has been installed but not yet configured, that is).
> Time to make a policy proposal? It would be something like:
> "Do not ever use the conffile mechanism to initialize a database".
Sounds reasonable. Anything that gets updated via an "update-foo"
thingie shouldn't be a conffile, as it is NEVER useful to upgrade to the
version in the newest package on an installed system.
Paul Slootman
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