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Re: Clarification of Policy and Packaging manuals requested



Christian Schwarz wrote:
> 2. I'm wondering why it's so hard for people to get the difference between
> configuration files and conffiles. Perhaps, the name "conffiles" is not a
> good name (but either way, it's unlikely that we'll change the name
> because this would be a _lot_ of work). Here is my understanding of these
> two terms: 
> 
>   conffiles (CF): a file that is listed in the `conffiles' control file of
>     a binary package (.deb)
> 
>   configuration file (CFGF): a file that may be changed by the local
>     system administrator to adjust a program to her needs
> 
> Clearly, these two things are not the same. 

Let's just wait and see what Manoj has to say. :-) This question of how to
define the terms is basically the key to this whole issue. (BTW: I agree
100% with your definitions.)

> 4. But tagging a file as CF also has disadvantages: The sysadmin is
> queried for each modified CF during package upgrades. This can be quite
> annoying and also confusing if the sysadmin doesn't know what the file is
> about. 

Not a good summary. The admin is only prompted iff the conffile on disk has
been modified somehow *and* the conffile in the new version of the package
that they are installing has changed from what it was in earlier versions of
the package. This tends to reduce such prompting a *lot*.

We still are seeing too much of this sort of prompting, though, you're
right.

> That's why we'll change policy WRT conffiles (CF) soon: CFs may
> not be modified by any scripts/programs of the package (or any other
> package)--CFs should only be touched by the local sysadmin.

(And so cannot be used for games score files, etc..)

> 5. However, there is an easy work around for getting the functionality of
> a CF w/o tagging the file as such: Simply don't include the package in the
> package tree (the .deb), but create and manage this file via the
> maintainer scripts (postinst, postrm, etc.). This is the suggested
> solution for CFGF which are modified by scripts.

The problem with this that have came up during this discussion was that
some packages have files like this, that are a few MB in size (ie, the
lambdamoo database, the dosemu hdimage). These files are obviously way to big
to be generated by the postinst. Manoj made several suggestions to work around
this (ie, install the file in /usr/, copy to /var in the postinst if it isn't
already in /var), but I have objections to all of them.

I've got no problem with using this method for trivial things like the game
score files, though.

-- 
see shy jo


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