Re: etc-overrides-non-etc configuration file model [Re: RFC: OpenRC as Init System for Debian]
Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, 10 May 2012, Uoti Urpala wrote:
>> Don Armstrong wrote:
>> > The reason why it is relevant is because [...]
>>
>> I don't see how the following would make this comparison with rpm
>> relevant.
>
> This is debian-devel, and we're talking about configuration file
> handling in Debian, which makes ucf and dpkg relevant.
>
>> > Having configuration files in /etc and using ucf or similar
>> > enables you to deal with this problem easily.
>>
>> Yes, you do need some tool improvements to be able to alert the user
>> about changes.
>
> Right. So for every package which does this, you have to check to see
> whether a configuration file in /etc has had it's corresponding
> non-etc configuration file changed, and then offer to merge them
> together.
FWIW, /etc/default/* and /etc/$package/conf.d/* and similar already do
something *very* close to what etc-overrides-non-etc does. To the point
that changing a file under /etc/default, or adding a snippet to conf.d/
can break just as well when the underlying default changes as if that
upstream happened to be outside of /etc.
We do not handle that case either, and I don't see how the default being
outside of /etc would be any different. Except it's easier to follow,
since the default is never modified by the admin, while if it's in /etc
too, like in plenty of cases in the archive, both can change, and we end
up with even scarier situations that can't be resolved sanely.
> So there's basically no advantage to etc-overrides-non-etc unless one
> hasn't bothered to implement proper configuration file handling.
Then we already have a problem, because the conf.d/ and default stuff
suffer from the same problems, and they're used widely all over the
place.
--
|8]
Reply to: