Re: Reducing downtime on system critical services

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 03:42:17PM -0700, Kevin Dalley wrote:
> Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> writes:
> > Those aren't config files, they are scripts to be run. The files in
> > the spool directory are also checked (atleast normally) by crontab
> > before making them active. So there is some measure of safety in
> > this setup.
>
> They are conffiles, at least quite often. /etc/cron.d/postgresql is a
> conffile for postgresql.

config files and debian conffiles aren't the same thing.  

debian conffiles are files which can be customised by the local sysadmin
without having to worry about the changes being blown away by the next
upgrade. this includes configuration files and some scripts - i.e.
'config files' are a subset of 'conffiles'.

this is why programs which originally have hard-coded configuration data
in the program itself often get modified to use a separate configuration
file when they are packaged for debian. e.g. i had to do that for my
dhcp-dns package, and i know many other developers do the same thing for
some of their packages.

craig

--
craig sanders