Re: Re: RFC: OpenRC as Init System for Debian
Marco d'Itri wrote:
> I am on friendly terms with many Red Hat people, but it is a fact that
> they take design decisions which are aligned with the needs of RHEL
> and these needs are often far from what is good for other distributions.
> - configuration files in /etc/ overriding configuration files in /lib/,
> to work around the inferior configuration files handling of RPM
I'm not convinced that the traditional Debian way of directly editing
package-created files under /etc would be preferable. I think the
etc-overrides-lib alternative is technically superior in many ways: the
original version is kept in a known location, it's trivial to
(temporarily) revert to defaults when you suspect a problem is caused by
local configuration, it's easier to see what has been locally modified
and what hasn't, and especially if the program supports file inclusion
(to include then override the default version) you can resolve more
updates without needing to do 3-way merges by hand.
The main argument against etc-overrides-lib has been that dpkg can
automatically give warnings about some of the cases where you may need
to update your local configuration. But this ability isn't really
inherent to the directly-editing case, nor only implementable with it. I
think this is better characterized as a case of Debian preferring an
inferior format because that's the only thing its existing tools already
support, while Red Hat is free to choose the superior format without
drawbacks as it never had such tools at all.
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