Re: [david@eelf.ddts.net: Re: why do we care about configuration files?]
> 3) Impatient but advanced user
> Somebody who dislikes being asked repeatedly whether or not a
> conffile can be overwritten. This user has tested xserver-xfree86's
> debconf interface, and has taken the time to understand how
> xserver-xfree86's postinst generates the configuration file based on
> the debconf information. He is very confident in it doing the right
> thing, and doesn't want to be bothered on each upgrade about whether
> or not it can overwrite it. More importantly, this user knows full
> well that, in the very rare circumstance where it *does* break, he
> can easily fix it within minutes.
>
> This user will likely feel the same way about almost all
> debconf/postinst-managed configuration files, excepting the few which he
> knows will break repeatedly. He doesn't want to get asked 50 "may I
> overwrite your file?" questions each upgrade. He knows that in the time
> spent reading and answering all those questions, he could just has
> easily fixed the two cases of breakage. Which he would have to do in
> addition to answering the questions, were they forced upon him.
This also comes down to another matter, where a package upgrade may run an
external program for generating configfiles. It would be nice if this
could also be handled with a "don't reconfig" flag.
Ex.
A while ago, although I believe this bug is fixed now, any upgrade to
XFree would automatically (!!) regenerate my XF86Config-4 file.
Unfortunatly, it would set the DefaultDepth to 24, which disables direct
rendering on my Voodoo3 machine. It was quite irritating with unstable
when occasionally OpenGL would just stop working and I would have to go
and manually reset DefaultDepth to 16.
Whilst this isn't happening anymore, I have seen other packaes do
similar things to deal with per-version configfile format changes, etc.
- Ender
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