Re: "The Debian exim 4 packages suck badly" on exim-users@exim.org

[Tore Anderson <tore@linpro.no>]

* Tollef Fog Heen

 > No.  If you have exim4 installed and install mailman, it's a
 > reasonable expectation that you want to use those two together.

  But you cannot know if I have changed, added, or removed files under
 conf.d/ in such a way which would make your drop-in routers and
 transports break the entire configuration.  The files are after all
 configuration the user is allowed to change as he pleases.

  Policy 10.7.3 says:

    Configuration file handling must conform to the following behavior:

    * local changes must be preserved during a package upgrade, [..]

  Even though you're not strictly changing _a_ configuration file by
 dropping files under conf.d, you're changing the configuration that
 Exim ends up reading.  I've always felt that the general principle
 that requirement is there for is something like "the user should be
 able to trust us not to fuck around with his custom configuration
 behind his back".  And unless you ensure that the snippets belonging
 to exim4-config isn't changed [in a significant way], you certainly
 will violate that principle.

 > It will be documented in NEWS.Debian ifwhen I get around to it.

  As far as I know NEWS.Debian is only displayed on upgrades, so that
 isn't sufficient.  That said, documenting that you're doing something
 undesireable isn't really an excuse for doing it in the first place.

  Please consider putting the snippets somewhere else, like under
 /etc/mailman/, and rather tell the user where to symlink them under
 /etc/exim4/conf.d/.

-- 
Tore Anderson