Bug#40766: PROPOSED] Rewrite of "Configuration files" section

[Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>]

On 17-Jul-99, 20:45 (CDT), Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk> wrote: 
> >      Note that a script that embeds configuration information (such as most
> >      of the files in `/etc/init.d' and `/etc/cron.{hourly,weekly,monthly}')
> >      is de-facto a configuration file and should be treated as such.
> 
> Do you know of any conffiles which are not configuration files?  The
> concept of a conffile which is not a configuration file is bizarre.
> I think that either the definition of configuration file should be
> expanded to include conffiles or your 4.7.3 should be expanded to
> include references to conffiles. 

The reasoning here is that a "conffile" is file that dpkg handles in a
special way (avoiding overwriting system-specific changes). That special
way is most often appropriate for configuration files, but there is
no technical reason it couldn't be used for non-configuration files
if that behavior is useful. Examples? Well, I don't really think of
the /etc/init.d startup scripts as configuration files in any purest
sense; they are more acurately described as "scripts subject to local
modification" (which I personally would prefer be modified to store the
configuration data (including whether or not the daemon was actually to
be started) somewhere else, leaving the actual init script unmodified).
Of course, I'm the one who put in the statement that init.d scripts are
"de-facto" a configuration file; I appear to be conflicted about this
topic.

I'm against saying that "every conffile is a configuration file" simply
because I don't want to lock out some other legitimate use of the
conffile mechanism.

Steve