Bug#412668: debian-policy: extended 10.7 to other forms of configuration (e.g. symlinks)
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.7.2.2
Severity: important
[Severity set as important, because the lack of a requirement can
have serious implications, including security ones.]
Configuration is sometimes represented in another way than contents
of a configuration file, e.g. a set of symbolic links. However there
is absolutely no reason to regard such information as less important
than the contents of a configuration file. This is particularly true
for 10.7.3, e.g. the Debian policy should require that local changes
in symbolic links (or whatever that can represent a configuration)
must be preserved during an upgrade.
An example is bug 412159 that is not regarded as a release-critical
bug though one of the settings is not preserved, because the
corresponding configuration is represented by a symbolic link
somewhere in /etc.
Note: though in this bug, the lost configuration is just one bit of
information, this is still annoying, and in general, symbolic links
can also represent much more information and possibly configuration
related to security/privacy settings.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-4-686-bigmem
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
-- no debconf information
Reply to: