Bug#40766: Rewrite of "configuration files" section

[Stefan Gybas <cab@studbox.uni-stuttgart.de>]

Steve Greenland wrote:

> What Hamish was pointing out is that it's okay to use emacs or vi or
> icepref to modify configuration files and even conffiles. The policy
> proposal was in no way meant to imply that you can't write programs to
> modify conffiles (either general or specific), just that they can't be
> used in a way that hides what they are doing. This is probably obvious
> to most people, which is why saying anything about it tends to be
> confusing.

>From reading your proposal (and the original policy text) I got the
impression that such tools would not be allowed. I'm also the maintainer
of Linuxconf (which is obviously such a tool) and someone on
debian-admintool once claimed that Linuxconf was violating policy because
it changes conffiles of other packages. So I would like to see a section
like this one from your other mail added to our proposal:

> It's ok to have a special/specialized editor to modify a conffile, but
> it should never be run by anything except a human, and it should be
> obvious to that human that the conffile is being modified.

> BTW, both this proposal (#40766) and the general clean-up proposal
> (#40767) are currently stalled with only one official seconder (Joey
> Hess).

I second both proposals.

-- 
Stefan Gybas