On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 02:15:52PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > > Anthony> Food for thought: would we be better or worse off if dpkg conffiles > > Anthony> suffered a similar fate (say, /etc/managed/dpkg/squid.conf)? > > If it works for some configuration files, it should work for > > others, even if they happen to be conffiles. > I mean more that files marked as conffiles could get put in > /etc/auto/dpkg/squid.conf, and a symlink added as /etc/squid.conf. Then > dpkg could automatically update /etc/auto/dpkg/squid.conf without having > to prompt ever... The bad side of which was that you wouldn't be allowed to edit the "conffile" and thus you wouldn't be prompted when changes happen, and everything would get confusing. Anyway. At the moment, we have the pretty sucky situation where admins would like to use tools like webmin to manage some config files that're marked as conffiles currently. This means they have to put up with irritating and completely pointless prompts on upgrades, and risk having their webmin setup temporarily trashed by mispressing a key in response to those prompts. It's not clear what dpkg's behaviour is if /etc/foo is marked as a conffile and /etc/foo is actually a symlink to /etc/auto/bar (or similar). It *tries* to just treat /etc/auto/bar as the conffile, but doesn't do it properly, so in effect stops prompting the admin at all. One possibility would be to make the current behaviour official, and rip out the buggy code that tries to be more clever. Then we could say: * files in /etc aren't to be touched by any programs except text editors, and via dpkg's conffile mechanism, and intelligent scripts to help automate syntax changes on upgrades * if you want to manage a file in /etc any other way, replace it with a symlink to /etc/auto/<yourpkg>/etc-foo, and manage that file instead. (Or something similar, with the previously discussed provisos for /var or /site-var or whatever) Something like that would probably work well. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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