Re: Directory structure suggestion for configuration in /etc

[Ángel <debian-devel@debian.16bits.net>]

On 2024-12-20 at 11:42 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Maybe it would be more productive to take the preference disagreement as
> given and then try to figure out how to proceed given that we're never
> going to all agree on the best way of handling configuration files? Is
> there some way that we can try to accomodate both groups?

Create a diversion from /etc to /usr/share/etc-conffiles-as-packaged

Mkdir your almost-empty etc folder on /root/etc-changes

Use a unionfs or union mount to combine /usr/share/etc-templates-as-packaged + /root/etc-changes mounted on /etc


As the cherry on top of the cake, there could be a package that did
this automatically.


The trickiest part is probably that, for early daemons to correctly use
that /etc, you may need to do that early in the boot process, in the
initrd, which is less comfortable to code. Alternatively, perhaps a
stub config on /etc would be enough for bootstrapping this (systemd
might interfere with this, though).



(*) I'm not sure the dpkg-divert mechanism would be able to handle a
diversion of /etc, but adding such support if missing would be simple
and *consistent* with the rest of the system.