On Sunday 29 January 2006 02:36, Santiago Vila wrote:
> + Sometimes two or more packgages need to be able to modify
> the + same configuration file. One such case is were related
> packages + share a configuration file (e.g. bash and other
> bourn compatible + shells share /etc/profile).
>
> You are implicitly saying that there are packages that "need" to modify
> /etc/profile.
The reason that /etc/profile is in base-files AFAICT is because it's shared
between all bourne-compatible shells. The above claims that /etc/profile is
an example of a shared configuration file. How is this inaccurate?
The actual shell packages don't do anything with /etc/profile at the moment,
so don't need a mechanism to adapt it.
On the other hand there's currently at least 5 packages[1] that have a blurb
in their README saying something to the effect of "add this bit
to /etc/profile for the package to do everything it promises to".
No surprise to me that all of those happen to fit the single extra use case
that this proposal documents.
-> So yes, there's a _demonstrated_ need for configuration packages to be
able to modify /etc/profile
> The way I read policy 9.9, packages should not need to modify /etc/profile
> to be useful.
Policy 9.9. talks about "programs depending on environment variables to
work" and explicitly forbids (with a must clause) using /etc/profile to set
up those environment variables.
None of which has anything to do with the use case of configuration
packages, which most empatically do _not_ modify anything _needed_ by a
program to work.
Programs will work just fine without the more specific configuration
provided by the configuration package, they just won't be set up to address
the needs of the more narrowly defined target that the configuration
package is aimed at.
> Therefore I object to this proposal in its current form.
Note that this proposal does not open op /etc/profile (or any other
configuration file) for random use by any package, especially use cases
that are explicitly forbidden by policy, it merely opens it up for
configuration packages as used by CDD's.
[1] desktop-profiles, user-de, user-es, user-euro-es, and sysprofile are
the ones I know of
--
Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
1. Encrypted mail preferred (GPG KeyID: 0x86624ABB)
2. Plain-text mail recommended since I move html and double
format mails to a low priority folder (they're mainly spam)
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