Bug#904248: Beginnings of a patch to add netbase to build-essential
On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 08:48:54 +0200 Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org> wrote:
> Josh Triplett writes:
> > Which effectively means the admin should never delete any existing entry
> > in the file, only add their own.
>
> It's a configuration file that is not supposed to ever be changed. If
> there are local changes, an admin will likely not include updates
> provided by newer packages.
>
> Sadly there are quite a bunch of files in /etc that aren't really
> configuration files :(
>
> > Much like /usr/share/misc/pci.ids and other such databases that record
> > the state of the real world and standards committees, editing these
> > files at all seems questionable.
>
> It is.
Which is a good argument for them not being in /etc.
> > Suppose, hypothetically, that these
> > files all moved to /usr/share/misc/ , and then libnss_files.so learned
> > to read both /etc/$file and /usr/share/misc/$file , with the former not
> > existing by default?
>
> That assumes the files are only accessed via libnss_files.so. There are
> however programs that just access the files directly.
That's a bug to be fixed.
> One can create /etc/services.local and have a service that merges
> services.local with the distribution-provided services to
> /var/lib/netbase/services.
Emphatically not, no; let's not have a *service* running to do this,
when we can just read both files.
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