Re: lintian and (non-)conffiles in /etc
On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 07:53:34PM -0800, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> >
> > No, I did not try to convince you policy says otherwise
> > but, at least to me who is not a native English speaker,
> > it sounds that policy does not say clearly that all files
> > in /etc should be conffiles.
> >
> > On the contrary it looks to me that policy says small subset
> > of the files in /etc are conffiles.
> >
> > And the statement on the difference between configuration
> > files and conffiles seems very confusing.
> >
>
> Policy does not require files in /etc to be marked as conffiles. When I
> implemented the lintian check I tried hard to find an example that showed a
> file in /etc that belonged in a package but was not marked as a conffile. I
> could not find one nor could other people. No one has yet given an example.
> As Ben says, policy may not require it but practice is backing it up.
Some stuff in sendmail like /etc/mail/sendmail.cf This file should not (is not? never actually checked) be marked as a conffile but it
certainly does belong in /etc/mail. It shoudn't be marked as conffile because it is generated from other files (conffiles). Hence if lintian
does check for such things it should only report a warning [since generated files should be generated on install] but not an error if a
non-conffile is found in /etc.
Just my two cents,
Adam
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