Bug#311188: debian-edu-config: Messes "programmatically" with conffiles of other packages
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On 29-05-2005 21:43, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Jonas Smedegaard]
>
>>It is a violation of Debian Policy to mess with conffiles of other
>>packages, and http://release.debian.org/sarge_rc_policy.txt section
>>3 adds this:
>
>
> Debian policy section 10.7.4 (Sharing configuration files) reads:
>
> The maintainer scripts must not alter a conffile of any package,
> including the one the scripts belong to.
>
> The base-config scripts are not maintainer scripts, so the behaviour
> of debian-edu-config do not break the written policy. So the sarge RC
> policy "clarification" is clearly a more extended rule than the one in
> the current policy.
I disagree: sarge RC policy being different from Debian Policy is not
extended rules, but clarifications of chosen interpretation at places
that can be (and is, like in this case) interpreted in several different
ways.
Section 3 of sarge RC policy shows that "maintainer scripts" are
interpreted as "everything invoked directly _and_ _indirectly_ by
package maintainance scripts".
You are correct in saying that Debian Policy can also be interpreted as
talking only about direct alteration.
> (And yes, I believe we need to find a better way to handle
> configuration in debian-edu, but while we wait, I see no better way to
> do it than the current mechanism. And I believe it is not breaking
> policy as it is written in the Debian Policy Manual today.
It sure breaks packages' maintainance that their conffiles are altered
by other packages (which I believe is the intend of D-P 10.7.4): It is
expected to be able to remove functionality of a package by removing a
package - that is not the case with debian-edu-config.
> It would be interesting to know which packages conffiles we affect, to
> have a work list of packages we need to make more configurable.
The following was extractedx manually from looking at "links" and
"editfiles" entries of cf/*.cf in the source of debian-edu-config:
amanda
apache
apt
bind8
bind9
cupsys
devfsd
dhcpserver
exim(4?)
nfs-common
autofs
courier-ldap
courier-authdaemon
inetutils-inetd
kdm
xfree86-common
cron
kdebase-bin
login
libpam-runtime
samba
ssh
su
base-files
libnss-ldap
libpam-ldap
slapd
dhcp3-server
procps
xfs
mime-support
munin-node
nagios
shorewall
slbackup
squid
sysklogd
webmin
Some of the editing seems to be replacing files with symlinks to other
files. I believe that is problematic even if allowed by policy, due to
bugs in dpkg (but no, I can't proove it).
Also, config files seemingly not owned by a specific package (like
/etc/hosts.allow ) is edited as well. Don't know if that is fine to mess
with programmatically.
- --
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
- Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
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