On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Colin Walters wrote: > Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes: > > > Well, if they will not, they should be forbidden to do it at > > all. Being there, got bugged to hell to fix it, fixed it. > > I'm confused; I think you may have misunderstood my message. The Maybe I did. Anyway, I was replying more to the whole thread, than to your message. > algorithm I gave I think allows people to still use dpkg-reconfigure > to rewrite their config files if they wish; but existing conffiles > will not be modified without user confirmation. I dislike the idea of keeping the autoritative data in the debconf database. These should be always in the config file. If the debconf scripts are made to read these in, you need to bother the user about confirmation only if the database and config file differ (for a given question)... and maybe not even then. Yes, it is a pain to write -- One ends up nearly recoding the dpkg conffile support in the config/postinst scripts sometimes. No, I do not believe taking the easy way out should be allowed. > If a maintainer chooses not to implement debconf support in such a way > that existing modifications to conffiles will be preserved, then when > someone does dpkg-reconfigure foo, they should get a warning that any > local changes will be blown away, and asked whether or not they want > to continue. I dislike this way of doing things... but I suppose that can't be helped. I certainly did not appreciate the need to add config file support to fetchmail postinst at the time; It would be asking too much to get everyone to do it just because it is better than "may I change your entire config file, Y/n". But let's make something clear: ONE CANNOT MODIFY CONFFILES IN MAINTAINER SCRIPTS. EVER. You can modify config files, but if you mark a config file as a conffile for dpkg, you must not touch it. Even if you ask the user. This is policy. Either let dpkg handle it all, or do all the handling on your scripts. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh
Attachment:
pgp28zPEMwbgX.pgp
Description: PGP signature