Re: Protecting user changes in developer scripts handled files

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

(following up to -devel only)

On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 01:30:49PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:

> 	Unwilling to create a narrow solution to this issue, I have
>  created a general purpose script that can be used to provide conffile
>  like handling that dpkg provides for conffiles for files managed by
>  by maintainer scripts.
> 
> 	The prompts also kinda look the same ;-)
> 
> 	The script has a man page, emits usage information, can be
>  made verbose, we can have copious debugging information if needed. It
>  is written in bash.

I haven't looked at your scripts much yet, but I like this idea.  It is more
or less what I had in mind here:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/debian-devel-200101/msg01852.html

I even sat down and wrote a partial implementation, which did all of the
prompting by substituting debconf templates.  This had advantages and
disadvantages, and in a complete implementation, would probably be an
optional feature.

It looks like your script creates a separate file with the md5 hash for each
config file.  This seems messy to me; in my design, I kept all of this data
in one file under /var.

-- 
 - mdz