Bug#408529: ucf: Better documentation: Not a replacement for debconf handling

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> wrote:

> severity 408529 wishlist

Severity set to `wishlist' from `wishlist'

Am I correct in reading into this some criticism of the way I reported
this bug?  Can you be more explicit, please?

> reassign 408529 developers-reference

And is there a specific reason why you did not remove the "patch" tag
upon reassigning?

>         Don't we already have a policy directive to not overwrite user
>  changes? And does not the dev ref say packages should not ask any
>  more questions than needed?

Of course, but that's not what this bug report is about.

>         Creating a new file using debconf, and using ucf to ask the
>  user whether or not to use that, is poor development practice, and
>  should be so mentioned in the dev ref about proper handling of
>  configuration files.  One should not clutter up ucf documentation
>  with a treatise on proper practice.

I still think that ucf's manpage is a proper place to document this, in
order to try to prevent ucf's frequent misuse.  

If you think this should rather be done in the developers reference
(which currently does not mention ucf, let alone advertise its use),
could you go a bit more into detail where you think the right place
would be, and what the important bits of information would be?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)