Re: It's Huntin' Season
On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 08:16:13PM -0600, Adam Heath wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, Malcolm Parsons wrote:
>
> > Bug #118987 was closed with this explanation:
> >
> > That's because all settings for devpts.sh are set in
> > /etc/default/devpts. So there should be no need to change devpts.sh.
> >
> > Should this bug be reopened with a serious severity?
> Yes.
Well I did, and Ben has closed it again.
> If /etc/init.d/devpts.sh is shipped in the .deb, it *MUST* be a conffile. If
> it is not shipped in the deb, then it *MUST* be a configuration file, and user
> edits to it must be preserved with some maintainer-provided way.
Ben's argument:
"From policy section 10.3.2:
The /etc/init.d scripts should be treated as configuration files,
either by marking them as conffiles or managing them correctly in
the maintainer scripts (see Configuration files, Section 11.7). This
is important since we want to give the local system administrator
the chance to adapt the scripts to the local system, e.g., to
disable a service without de-installing the package, or to specify
some special command line options when starting a service, while
making sure her changes aren't lost during the next package upgrade.
Since this section specifically talks about init.d scripts, it overrides
generalities such as the blanket "all files should be conffiles"[1].
Now, since I control all variables for /etc/init.d/devpts.sh in
/etc/default/devpts, then /etc/init.d/devpts.sh does not need to be
markes as a conffile."
My comment on this:
The first line says "should", this lets Ben claim that an init.d script
is not a configuration file, so it therefore doesn't need to be handled
as one. Is this really what the author of this section of policy
intended? Is it too late to change policy so it says "must"?
> If the maintainer of libc6 says you shouldn't edit that file, then the
> maintainer is wrong.
Can you argue this with him then?
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