James Blanford wrote: > I am concerned with a new trend that uses debconf to configure personal > information into system files. I'll start with an exaggerated example. > I have a Window Maker dockapp, wmbday, that counts down the seconds to > my birthday and then displays the message, "Happy Birthday, > Yournamehere!". If I installed it the way some dockapps do it now, > debconf would ask for my name and birth date and put that info in > command line parameters in the /usr/lib/menu/wmbday file. > > Now even legitimate users of the program have access to my personal > information, not to mention that it is also possible for any user, > daemon or hacker to read the info from this world readable file. > > The real packages I'm talking about are wmweather and wmmoonclock. The > former stores your METAR (local weather station) code in > /usr/lib/menu/wmweather and the latter stores your latitude and > longitude. These are not big concerns for me, but it's not hard to > imagine some person or some organization that wouldn't want this info to > be exposed. I doubt these programs should be modifying /usr like that. Conffiles belong in /etc, generated files in /var. Worth a bug report on the FHS violations alone. It also seems to me it would be better to let these programs read a dotfile in $HOME, with perhaps an interactive GUI congfigurator that they can bring up, and not have a site-wide configuration for them at all. But I don't grok the privacy concerns: If you have users on your local machine from whom you want to hide the location of your machine, you have bigger problems than METAR. The time zone and routing table of your machine come to mind, and I am sure there is much more. But, all such data should be in /etc and /var where admins can find if if they are really trying to lock down a machine in this manner. That's where the FHS comes in. > I could find no Debian guideline on this matter. Certainly one could > define the difference between configuration that changes how a program > runs and configuration that personalizes the program for a specific > user. Right, I think it's a well-estblished conventon that the former goes in /etc and the latter in $HOME. -- see shy jo
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