Re: RFC: OpenRC as Init System for Debian
Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> writes:
> On 2012-05-09 14:01 +0200, Gergely Nagy wrote:
>
>> Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> writes:
>>
>>> On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 10:39:38AM +0200, Gergely Nagy wrote:
>>>> > And the integrator/packager may not want to learn all the funny
>>>> > languages that daemons can be written in (ocaml, haskell, java, ruby,
>>>> > ...). Besides, init scripts are conf files on Debian for good reasons.
>>>> So are unit files and configuration files. If the daemon can't be
>>>> configured and started properly without an init script's help, then
>>>> something's very broken.
>>>
>>> Technical nit: No, unit files aren't. AIUI a package would ship its
>>> unit file in /lib/systemd/system (i.e. RedHat-style). If you need to
>>> override it, you're of course free to copy it to /etc/systemd/system and
>>> make the necessary adjustments. You will not, however, get a conffile
>>> update prompt when the system file changes (e.g. to update your own
>>> local copy to incorporate the fix).
>>
>> Nothing prevents us from shipping the symlinks in the debian package
>> (which some packages do, like rsyslog). The symlinks can be marked as
>> conffiles (which rsyslog does not do) and then modifications will be
>> preserved.
>
> FWIW, marking symlinks as conffiles is not to be recommended currently,
> since dpkg does not handle them the way most people would expect[1,2].
I know. But in case the symlink points to a non-conffile, even with the
disadvantages, it's better to mark one as conffile than to overwrite
user settings.
At least until a tool exists that can handle the situation better,
marking these symlinks as conffiles is the best I can think of. The only
disadvantage I found so far, is that during upgrades, the user won't be
notified, and a .dpkg-new file will be created if the symlink was
modified in any way. That does not cause any ill side-effects, I
believe, and the biggest issue is that the user is not notified.
If the file from /lib was copied and modified, it can be diffed with
.dpkg-new. If the symlink was altered, and the target changed too (due
to another package upgrading), that's a problem, but nothing would save
us from that, except putting the unit files under /etc to begin with.
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