Re: the netbase/inetd conspiracy
In chiark.mail.debian.devel, you wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 09:50:00AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> Didn't we have this discussion recently? I'm sure there are cases where
>> a deleted file is treated differently from an empty file by the
>> application.=20
>
>So list them.
The thread "When bind9 reinstalls, no db.root"
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200208/msg01375.html
onwards) suggested that snmpd would be an issue.
>> In that case, restoring deleted files is definitely a bad
>> idea ("I accidently deleted the binary so reinstalled the package, and
>> it blew away my configuration!")
>
>Well, no, it didn't do that. It restored your configuration, since you'd
>already blown it away. Maybe that's undesirable in some situations (and,
>indeed, I can think of some -- I can also think of ways to make them not
>an issue). It would help if you'd share some specifics, so we could talk
>about them.
This depends on whether you consider a missing configuration file to be
part of your configuration or not, which gets into nice semantic
arguments. I'm not too bothered either way, as long as it's made clear
and any packages that would behave differently as a result are made
happy with the new situation.
We'd also need to educate users that rm /etc/foo and cp /dev/null
/etc/foo will behave differently. At the moment I delete stuff in cron.d
that I don't want. Some of these seem to be marked as conffiles, but I
think expecting them not to come back on package reinstall is fairly
legitimate.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.devel@srcf.ucam.org
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