Re: Removing former conffiles
Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Feb 2006, Frank Küster wrote:
>> Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> wrote:
>> > You've now got a conffile in a location which is not /etc, namely
>> > /var/lib/bla, which cannot be overridden by the administrator.
>>
>> No, I don't. The program reads its configuration from a file in
>> /var/lib/bla, but the conffiles (or configuration files) reside in
>> /etc/bla/bla.d.
>
> The configuration file is the file from which the configuration is
> read, that is, the file in /var/lib/blah which isn't in /etc.
Why?
> This
> setup forces the administrator to use a your special conffile setup
> which they can't override.[1]
[...]
> 1: In the sense that they can't decide that using the conf.d is silly
> and ship a single configuration file.
Okay, I see your point. Generally I agree with you, although in the
particular example, teTeX, your're wrong: They still can override the
scheme.
> In addition, you get compliance with policy,
Our setup is also policy-compliant.
> and an implementation
> which is more obvious to the administrator.
And clutters /etc/texmf unnecessarily. And has one more severe
drawback: People who forgot (or never noticed) that the file is
generated from files in conf.d will open /etc/texmf/bla.conf in their
favorite editor, change the generated file without noticing, and will be
surprised if the change is lost after the next package upgrade.
> A third option would be to build the conffile in /var/lib/blah, and
> use ucf or similar to prompt for the difference betwen /var/lib/blah
> and /etc/blah.
Been there, done something similar. ucf is a nice workaround for a
missing feature in dpkg, but it confuses users. I avoid it if I can.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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