Re: Bug#780797: Package modifying a user-modified config file? [Bug #780797]
Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net> writes:
> On 2015-03-21 13:14:08 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Correct. The Policy statement is about preserving user changes, not
>> about never touching any file that a user has modified in any way. The
>> package is free to modify unchanged portions of the configuration file,
>> and this has been routinely done during package updates in Debian for
>> as long as I've been involved in the project.
> I disagree.
You disagree that this is what Policy says, or you disagree that this is a
good idea? If it's the latter, I understand your point. If it's the
former, well, you can disagree, but you're incorrect. Sorry.
You have probably been misled by dpkg's behavior with conffiles, but
that's primiarly because dpkg conffile handling is at the per-file level,
and only knows whether the file has changed at all. This is not how
configuration files that are not conffiles have been handled, and it
applies only at the file granularity with conffiles. Consider a
configuration that's broken into four or five separate conffiles. The
ones that the user didn't change have always been updated silently.
The Policy statement here is primarily about semantics, not about files.
> In such a case there would be *no way* for the user to tell Debian not
> to modify his configuration, i.e. an upgrade could silently break the
> user configuration, like this happened here.
Policy does not prohibit every thing that a maintainer might want to do
that may not be a good idea. I get that you find the change surprising.
I don't particularly agree with it either. But Policy is not the stick
with which to solve every problem you might have with what a package
maintainer chooses to do. Sometimes things are just old-fashioned bug
reports. :)
> The only time where a maintainer script could change a config file
> modified by the user is when this is absolutely necessary, e.g. because
> the behavior changed in the software, an option has been renamed, and
> things like that.
That's certainly a valid point of view, but this is not the line that
Debian has historically drawn. And drawing that line would result in a
lot more prompting during dist-upgrades, so there's a tradeoff here.
> But even in these cases, this should be announced in the NEWS file.
I'm inclined to agree with you in this case, but Policy doesn't currently
make that a requirement.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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