Bug#34296: etc/apt/sources.list is a conffile
Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> writes:
> Sorry, I didn't explain well. I was referring to the "format" of the file,
> i.e. the allowed internal structure of it.
I guess my opinion is that if you make it not a conffile, then you
shift the burden onto the package maintainers to make sure and remeber
whenever they change the format of the file, that they have to prompt
the user in the postinst rather than using the existing conffile
mechanism which was designed for this. This can be tricky if the
existing format doesn't have a version number. Basically the postinst
has to keep a history of all the changes and upon upgrade, see if the
user is upgrading from a version that had a different format and if
so, prompt. This is IMO messy and error prone.
> Once you have chosen your desired mouse type, it is a good thing
> that dpkg does not ask you over and over again about this file.
Given my understanding of conffiles, if apt is prompting over and over
again (and I agree that I've seen that a number of times), then either
the apt people are changing sources.list upstream all the time, or
something is broken that needs fixing. If the former, then the first
question IMO is "Why?" rather than "Why is sources.list a conffile?".
If the latter, then we should hunt the bug.
> 1. Is http://http.us.debian.org a reasonable default for *everybody* or
> just for the US?
This shouldn't matter. IMO they need to just put *something*
"standard" in there, and just leave it alone. If they do that then
you should never get prompted about it.
I guess I would agree that sources.list shouldn't be a conffile if we
didn't have entries that we could put in sources.list that would
almost never need to be changed. But if we just put
us.debian.org/stable and nonus.debian.org/stable then these shouldn't
need to be touched for a long time. The question isn't whether or not
these are reasonable defaults for everyone. The question is "Are they
good enough examples so that we shouldn't have to touch them for the
forseeable future?".
--
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930
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