Re: Bug#150514: Uer maodifications _must_ bre preserved, even is a co-admin said otherwise a few releases ago
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 01:57:36PM -0500, srivasta@acm.org wrote:
> >>"Gordon" == Gordon Russell <gor@dcs.napier.ac.uk> writes:
>
> 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.
Yes I agree that this seems in breach of Policy. The Policy also goes
on to say something about not asking questions on an upgrade. I disagree
with your philosophy that debian=multi-user and thus system administration
is an uncontrolled multi-user activity. This is not sensible as a procedure,
and I will not go out of my way to support uncontrolled system administration
where the administrators do not know what they are doing and do not talk to
each other.
> I also note that you are overwriting /etc/serial.conf without
> asking, too; I am not usre that this is kosher either.
Again I ask in preconf and when the package is reconfigured. You can set
this info directly in serial.conf, and thus I would argue that user
configuration of this file must be in the appropriate way to make it valid.
I can ask it every time but this is not sensible. I actually like your ucf
system and can see it as being useful for setserial controlling serial.conf.
I may indeed upgrade to using it (providing you get the priority set higher)
but I do not recognise a Policy breach and want to do it only because it
is potentially better.
>
> 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.
To be honest there is a lot of truth is what you say, but I am sure that the
users will not want a debconf question every time (can be done by setting
priority high in the debconf question).
>
> 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.
/etc is local for each machine by definition.
>
> Note policy stating that common practice is to call the
> update/configure scripts iff the config file does not already
> exist.
Yes, and quite honestly I do not understand this. Things like serial.conf
and modules.conf may be changed many times in a single uptime to reflect the
system, which differs from a single-creation config file. Perhaps there is
an argument for another style of file in /etc which relates to usually changing,
persistent data, where sometimes they are reconfigured to be user-controlled
files, like the ones we are discussing.
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