Re: RFC: OpenRC as Init System for Debian

[George Danchev <danchev@spnet.net>]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:11:21 +0300, Uoti Urpala 
<uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi> wrote:
> Dmitry Nezhevenko wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 02:44:42PM +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > > Wrong. Any program behavior change may require changing custom
> > > configuration, but such changes need not be accompanied by changes 
> > in
> > > the default configuration file. Currently dpkg lacks any mechanism 
> > to
>
> > You are talking about changing "default" values, right? Other cases
>
> More generally about things not necessarily directly related to any
> particular option. For example changing heuristics in the program, 
> which
> may require using different options to override (even if the options
> themselves didn't change).
>
>
> > > > With "etc-overrides-lib" it's not possible at all...
> > >
> > > This is not true either. You could develop tools that work in this 
> > case.
>
> > Yeah. I agree. It's _currently_ not possible at all.
>
> It is possible the with etc-overrides-libs behavior. Your 
> "_currently_
> not possible" is about the current state of the Debian tools, not 
> about
> etc-overrides-libs. My original point was exactly that the issues are
> due to limitations of the existing Debian tools, not fundamental
> problems with the etc-overrides-libs model itself.

It is entirely possible to manage configuration files from dpkg's 
maintainer
scripts (postinst on 'configure' stage, and resp. postrm) as you find 
fit,
or by means of ucf, and possibly in combination with debconf.

One can ship a bunch of configuration files in /usr/share/$pkg, or
rather /usr/share/doc/$pkg/examples/ to avoid redundancy,
and have them copied to /etc/$whatever or whatever is needed.

(this has been so for more than a decade)