Re: It's Huntin' Season

[Peter S Galbraith <p.galbraith@globetrotter.net>]

Malcolm Parsons <malcolm@ivywell.screaming.net> wrote:

> Anyone object to me filing serious bugs against the 200 or so packages
> on this page?
> 
> http://lintian.debian.org/reports/Tfile-in-etc-not-marked-as-conffile.html
> 
> I'll be ignoring all the README files.

I replied:

> Please ignore all the Emacs ones too.

Malcolm Parsons <malcolm@ivywell.screaming.net> wrote:

> No.
>
> If the .el files are not supposed to be edited they should not be in
> /etc

Nice reaction.
 
We don't have a choice; that's where they go.  Please read Emacs policy.
That's where we put files that Emacs reads on startup to setup add-on
packages (e.g. /etc/emacs/site-start.d/).

We discussed this on debian-emacsen last year. See:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-emacsen/2001/debian-emacsen-200102/msg00012.html

A lot of maintainers don't mark the files there as confiles because they 
don't expect them to be edited.  If you want a second startup.d
directory outside of /etc for this purpose, change Emacs policy and
patch the added started code in all Emacsen.  Then we can move our code
out.

But at least discuss this on debian-emacsen instead of spontanously
submitting serious bug against packages for something that has been the
custom to do.

It's possible that some packages have moved to setting it as conffile
simply because debhelper might be use to install the Emacs files, and
when DH_COMPAT is set to 3 they are made conffiles automatically.
(I noticed that the mh-e package I recently uploaded has marked as a
conffile precisely for this reason, while my older packages don't.)

How about it, debian-emacsen collegues, is it time to set (or follow)
policy and mark them _all_ as conffiles?  Do we have clear example of
where this would be a nuisance?

Thanks,
Peter