Bug#162120: Support #162120
On 08 Jul 2003 10:42:25 +0200, Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk> said:
> The proposal is that policy explicitly permit what is already done
> by some packages -- namely, the regeneration of configuration files
> that have been deleted. This seems sensible. This clause will
> serve as a warning to administrators that deleting configuration
> files may not have the effect that they expect.
Though policy is, in some sense, supposed to document current
behaviour, this should not be taken as a license to violate policy,
since if "some packages" do violate policy, then of course policy
would be changed.
> It would also be helpful to say that if an administrator wishes to
> prevent the regeneration from happening then he should empty the
> file, not delete it.
This, then, has all the negatives that ajt seems to think that
not regenerating configuration files has. And would not work in the
corner case where mere presence of a file changes program behaviour
(though I do not know, off hand, if there are any instances of this
behaviour out there -- /etc/nologin does not have the problem, since
no one would rationally want to recreate that)
So now we have an inconsistent way in which the project
handles user changes to conffiles -- dpkg and ucf try to ensure that
user5 deletions are honoured, and otrher packages explicitly do not
honour these changes, by recreating the files -- even though these
packages can't ensure that the configuration file present on the
system always has relevant data, since since people can just
echo '' > /rtc/file
So, instead of creating useful defaults, these programs would
rather that we change policy, even though changing policy does not
actually obviate the need for the defaults -- since one can just
empty the file rather than removing it.
As I said earlier, not having sane defaults, and depending on
the configuration file to provide sane defaults is suboptimal
behaviour; and should be considered a bug.
> A counter-proposal from Manoj Srivastava was (explicitly?) to forbid
> the regeneration of configuration files that have been deleted, but
> this was shot down by AJT in no uncertain terms.
It was? I only saw ajt coming in foaming at the mouth and
spewing expletives, and have some of his ranting countered by me, but
obviously your mileage varied.
manoj
--
The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves. Sophocles
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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