Re: Clarification of Policy and Packaging manuals requested
[You (Manoj Srivastava)]
>Zed> After having lurked in debian-devel for a while, I suspect that
>Zed> Manoj will object that developers for Debian need to be sufficiently
>Zed> proficient in writing shell scripts and whatever else that they can
>Zed> deal with this on their own.
>Zed> I think that mindset is not in the best interests of the Debian
>Zed> project.
>
> I think I disagree. Letting developers who can't write shell
> scripts can in no way be in the interests of the project, one of
> whose goals is *excellence*.
Well, unfortunately, there is no test on skill with shell scripts as a
criteria for becoming a maintainer.
Moving on, suppose we add a policy (and lintian check) that files
protected by dpkg conffiles mechanisms must be in /etc. All other files
must be managed by other means (i.e., postinst, postrm, etc.)
Manoj, you miss the point that creating conditions where errors are
possible makes errors inevitable, statistically speaking, for these
errors to occur. Crippling, nasty errors. Oops sorry, you just lost
your lambdamoo database.
Of course, the quality of the distribution is the ultimate deciding
factor, not developer convenience. I think we need to weigh the increase
in number of bugs from whatever dubious value would be received by
insisting all files protected by dpkg's conffile mechanism reside in
/etc.
I think of conffiles as "statefiles" rather than "config files".
I agree that actual package configuration must reside in /etc.
Yet I accept that the entire package local state is more than just the
package itself as shipped and the conffiles. Hello, /var or /usr/local!
.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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