Re: Bug#150514: Uer maodifications _must_ bre preserved, even is a co-admin said otherwise a few releases ago
>>"Gordon" == Gordon Russell <gor@dcs.napier.ac.uk> writes:
Gordon> I draw your attention to an extract from 11.7.3 "..must not
Gordon> overwrite or otherwise mangle the user's configuration
Gordon> without asking..."
Gordon> I do ask. Thus I do not violate policy. The MUST clause you
Gordon> mention is clarified by the text which follows it (e.g the
Gordon> quoted text shown).
But you don't. You retrieve the information from debconf,
where it had been set at some point in the potentially remote
past by someone else. Had you been asking everytime, this would not
be an issue.
I also note that you are overwriting /etc/serial.conf without
asking, too; I am not usre that this is kosher either.
However, since there is an obvious difference of opinion
between us, perhaps this needs be brought up to the general developer
body for clarification; is asking a question once, and
potentially never asking it again, enough to satisfy the policy
requirement of preserving user changes? My reading of the section is
that the behaviour has to be similar to how dpkg handles conffiles;
and dpkg does ask every time.
The risk of doing otherwise, especially on a multiuser system,
is that one may just copy configuration files between all the
machines in ones environment, and, if not all are Debian machines,
one may lose changes made after copying the common file and tweaking
it for the local box.
Note policy stating that common practice is to call the
update/configure scripts iff the config file does not already
exist.
manoj
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