Re: Debian systemd survey
Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no> writes:
> ]] Russ Allbery
>> There's really no reason to have something like an /etc/default
>> setting for that, the way there is for the rsyncd init script. You
>> can just edit that directly (well, it's systemd, so you have to copy
>> it into /etc and make a new version and then won't know if anything
>> about the default changes -- a truly awful design, but that's another
>> argument).
> .. and to work around that, we're likely to tell people to use ucf for
> the files, so you will get notification on updates. (Or you can use the
> .include syntax as smcv wrote about.)
Yeah, I should be clear that this is certainly something we can fix. It's
not intrinsic to the systemd software itself, only in the design of the
default configuration behavior. The software itself supports both
configuration models, which actually makes it more flexible than designs
that only support one configuration model. Also, to be fair, there are
some advantages to having a canonical and working version of the
configuration kept outside of configuration space where it won't be
modified and is available as a fallback in various situations. There have
been times when I've wanted that for other Debian configuration files.
With some new tool development, we could do better than dpkg does with
straight /etc/default files. The syntax is so much simpler that we could,
for instance, eventually develop quite intelligent three-way merge tools.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: