Re: policy for shipping sysctl.d snippets in packages?
On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 2:52 AM, Christian Seiler wrote:
> But this is a much more general problem. A lot of software in Debian
> ships configuration files in /etc that look like this:
>
> #
> # Setting ABC
> #
> #ABC = 123
I always thought that Debian shipping what is essentially
documentation in /etc is weird. This stuff belongs in the manual pages
or other documentation.
> If in any of these cases the default in the code changes, the behavior
> of the software changes.
Indeed, most default configuration is in one of /usr/*bin /usr/lib
/usr/share and isn't in a form that can be version controlled or
compared between versions.
> In my experience, having to merge configuration files on updates
> has cost me a _lot_ of time.
Especially since most packages don't use ucf, which has 3-way merge.
> Personally, from a user point of view I really like the "vendor
> defaults in /usr, user configuration in /etc" scheme.
Likewise.
> I consider dpkg's default behavior to be horrible (no copy
> of the original is saved anywhere, so no 3-way merge is
> possible [2]), I never completely grokked ucf as a user (I stumbled
> upon ucf prompts on updates of some packages that used it, and only
> once it actually did manage to do what I wanted automatically, the
> other times I found the way you could manually intervene in the
> merging process there to be highly unintuitive), and I gave up on
> trying to understand ucf from a package maintainer's perspective a
> long time ago.
I've always found ucf's 3-way merge to do exactly what I want.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Reply to: