Re: policy violation and bug reports. - some resolution?

[Joost Kooij <kooij@mpn.cp.philips.com>]

On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Christian Schwarz wrote:

> Recall, that we discussed how to handle `variable data files which are not
> edited by humans but by scripts/programs' a few days/weeks ago. The result
> of the discussion was that `conffiles' may only be edited by humans, not
> by scripts. (This result will be included in the next release of the 
> policy manual.) As score files are clearly edited by a program (i.e., the
> game) and not by the user/sysadmin, they must not be marked as conffiles.

I see a difference between:

- programs editing files on behalf of the user, like a highscore file, my
netscape preferences or some .foo that I tweaked with the help of
dotfile-foo;

- programs editing files on behalf of the sysadmin cq. packaging system,
like foo.postinst scripts or generally anything that's intended to do a
one-time system-wide configuration.

Ideally, having something like menu, but for "dotfiles", allowing
maintenance scripts to write to parts of the configuration while keeping
user preferences and overrides, would make the case clearer, but I guess
in the absence of such a system, that is not really opportune now. 

Cheers,


Joost