Re: Init scripts as conffiles
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 05:27:39PM +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:
> I'd consider packages which require editing of the init script instead
> of using /etc/default or similar to be badly designed at best. I know
> fixing the mass of existing packages would be too big a job, but I
> thought it might be possible to provide a new option in dh_installdeb
> and encourage its use for new packages.
Well, I think there are probably quite a few package maintainers who
simply don't consider that the admin might want to start a daemon in
a different way than what's provided by the initscript. For example,
the daemon in question runs as root:root and I want to wrap it to
run as a specific uid:gid pair I've created for the purpose, or the
initscript only starts one instance of a daemon and I need several
launched all pointing to individual configuration files.
I agree that pretty much all of these use cases would be valid
enough to open wishlist bugs on and include proposed patches, but a
lot of admins just want to change start behavior of a daemon (often
in complex ways not anticipated by the packager) and move on,
without having it clobbered by a stable package update later.
Obviously, when running testing/unstable/experimental or during a
dist-upgrade (and sometimes even the occasional security update),
you still have to pay attention to and manually merge changes in
your locally-modified initscripts, but the same can be said of any
conffile.
--
{ IRL(Jeremy_Stanley); WWW(http://fungi.yuggoth.org/); PGP(43495829);
WHOIS(STANL3-ARIN); SMTP(fungi@yuggoth.org); FINGER(fungi@yuggoth.org);
MUD(kinrui@katarsis.mudpy.org:6669); IRC(fungi@irc.yuggoth.org#ccl);
ICQ(114362511); YAHOO(crawlingchaoslabs); AIM(dreadazathoth); }
Reply to: