Re: It's Huntin' Season
On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 12:23:06PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> For what it is worth, I disagree strongly. Start up files
> change the behaviour of my editor-OS, and I should have a chance to
> tweak that. Every rationale that lead us to declare that all
> configuration files need bve under /etc, and that these need to be
> editable applies to emacs lisp start files as well.
> And how exactly do emacs lisp start up files not qualify?
I guess that depends on how you define a "start up file". Surely the point
here is that emacs deliberately blurs the distinction between configuration
and code.
Debian policy distinguishes (or tries to) between configuration and code.
Take it to the (ridiculous) limit and you put *everything* in /etc, as
"you might want to run a hex editor over libc"...
So, it comes to to the Emacs policy or individual maintainers to decide what
is a config file (and should go in /etc) and what is not (and should probably
in this case go in /usr/share somewhere).
Given the above, surely it's up to the debian-emacsen to go away and decide
their policy on what constitutes a config file as far as Emacs is concerned,
and put them in the appropriate places.
When they've done that, we can all start filing RC bugs against any package
which poops all over changes made to any file in /etc.
> When a machine starts up, a number of processes are started,
> and the behaviour of these processses, or whether they start at all
> (which changes the behaviour of my machine), is governed by the start
> up scripts. alsa actually loads and unloads modules from the kernel
> (changing the behaviour of the kernel in a marked
> fashion). bootmisc.sh is another nice place to hook things into. Or
> checkfs.sh. console-screen.sh. I could go on.
It's also governed by a whole bunch of other *executables*. Just 'cos
something is human-readable doesn't mean that it can/should be edited
by admins (and is therefore a config file). How far on would you like
to go? Hex-editing libc because it affects the bootup of your machine
in a way that you'd like to tweak? Or just a load of the perl CPAN
modules that happen to be used by some init script or other?
Maybe this:
======================================================================
configuration file
A file that affects the operation of a program, or provides site-
or host-specific information, or otherwise customizes the
behavior of a program. Typically, configuration files are
intended to be modified by the system administrator (if needed or
desired) to conform to local policy or to provide more useful
site-specific behavior.
======================================================================
is overly vague; maybe it's deliberately vague, as there are grey areas
which need to be left to informed discretion.
Please could the debian-emacsen go away and use their informed discretion.
When they have a consensus, they can call it "an updated emacs policy" ;)
Cheers,
Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
If you can read this, you're too close.
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