Bug#61308: PROPOSAL] Initializing databases by using conffiles.
On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 02:47:10PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Anthony Towns wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 02:10:54PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > > \begin{proposal}
> > > Do not initialize a text database by using the conffile mechanism.
> > > \end{proposal}
> >
> > What is a `text database' ? That term seems very unclear to me; but
> > based on the bug report I'd certainly be happy to second something
> > clearer to achieve this.
>
> By text database I refer to a database which is in plain text format,
> like /etc/printcap, /etc/passwd, /etc/group or /etc/mailcap.
I think this proposal is silly: for something like the cases you
mention, it is obvious that they should not be conffiles, but should
be created by the postinst if they do not already exist. It would
clearly be very stupid for these to be conffiles. In particular,
given the update-mime program, /etc/mailcap should obviously not be a
conffile. And as it is, the maintainer should change that -- but
changing policy isn't going to make that happen any more quickly.
I think it should be up to the maintainer of the package to decide
whether a given configuration file should be handled by the conffile
mechanism or not, of course taking account of bug reports.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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