Re: How can I modify /etc/inittab?

[Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 06:20:48PM +0300, Eddy Petri?or wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> The application I want to package, qingy, is in fact a replacement for
> getty and it needs to modify /etc/inittab.
> 
> Is it allowed for my package to do this automatically? Any idea how
> can I do this automatically?
That file is not included in any package that I can see, so it is
therefor not a conffile, but a configuration file.  The proper way to
modify configuration files is through some "well-defined interface".
I don't know if such an interface exists .. 

inittab controls init, and it is included in package sysvinit.  I
can't see that this package includes any "well-defined interface".

I would suggest asking the sysvinit maintainer, and also looking at
how other getty replacements work.

This might be a case of: generalized, maintscript-handled
configuration files aren't "owned" by a given pacakge in the same way
that conffiles are, and so the "right" way of doing it is to overwrite
the file (but I'm not at all sure about this).  The sysvinit postinst
just does:

  if [ ! -f /etc/inittab ]
  then
          cp -a /usr/share/sysvinit/inittab /etc/inittab
  fi

Justin