On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 03:27:50PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > On Tue, 8 Jul 2003 12:08:38 -0700, Chris Waters <xtifr@debian.org> said: > > > On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 06:29:33PM +0200, Thomas Hood wrote: > >> Second, propose a change to policy such that it explicitly forbid > >> the recreation of configuration files that the admin has deleted. > >> This idea was rejected by AJT before and presumably will be again. > >> However, you might be able to get the proposal accepted. > > > Some packages may require a config file, in which case, I think they > > would be justified in recreating it. > Eh? Suppose I do echo "" > config file, you are going to blow > my changes away and "recreate the configuration as the package deems > fit"? > Packages ought not to rely on the configuration file to > provide sane defaults. Is this in policy somewhere? I know that applications must not depend on environment variables for sane defaults, but I don't remember anything about not being able to depend on config files for this. I think depending on a config file for sane defaults is much better than heavily patching an upstream binary for the same effect. As to the question of whether rm /etc/config/file should be respected, c.f. the behavior of update-rc.d (a policy-mandated interface), which regards the total absence of symlinks as an indication that they should be re-added. There's lots of precedent for this sort of config file handling, and I'm not sure that it's particularly beneficial to require packages to respect the removal of a config file. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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