Re: Conffiles and possible conffiles
On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 11:31:22AM +0100, Frank K?ster wrote:
> Hi,
>
> on the debian-tetex-maint mailing list we often have problems to decide
> which of the thousands of TeX input files should be treated as
> configuration files - in principle, each of them can be changed in order
> to change the behavior of the system. We are currently thinking about a
> solution were there would be hardly any conffiles[1], but a local admin
> could put copies of any file he likes into subdirectories of /etc/texmf.
> This would shadow the dpkg-shipped file in /usr/share/texmf and allow
> configuration. And of course we would document this.
In my opinion, kpathsea offer multi-level override and this is the best
way to handle conffiles, so we should take advantage of it. This mean
doing what you propose.
This is the way Debian menu works: put menu entries in /usr/share/menu,
allow the sysadmin to override them in /etc/menu and allow
the user to override them in ~/.menu.
If I were to redesign Debian/Unix from scratch, I would make 3-way override
mandatory.
So I think this is a great idea. I was on the verge of proposing that
two year ago during the texmf.d flamefest but I though there was an
unforeseen reason it could not work.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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