David Starner wrote: > Santiago Vila wrote: > > The bug basically says "/etc/locale.gen should not be a conffile > > because most people will need to modify it" but Ben does not agree > > that people using locales is "most people". > > Recent copies (unless it was changed back to big file edition) are > blank, and add the list of locales to /usr/share/doc/locales/SUPPORTED.gz. > So people will very rarely get prompted for changes. Then, what's the problem?
Very rarely != never. If you put an /etc/locale.gen file which is different than the default one before installing locales_2.2, dpkg will still prompt about it. We are supposed to minimize the number of questions. If we can go from "very rarely" to "never", that's already a gain. If we can make every Debian user to save five seconds of time and we have one million users, that's five million of saved seconds. > I don't want to have to go through a debconf interface to try and configure > my locale.gen file; heck, SUPPORTED doesn't even include half my locales > (mainly UTF-8). How does making it a conffile hurt things again? > > (locale.gen attached as an extreme example that needs to be supported.) I never asked for a debconf interface (I explained in the bug report (#110980) a possible way to do it and it would take just a few lines of shell scripting). I just asked following policy. What's wrong with following policy when it says configuration files for which there is not a default which satifies almost everybody should not be managed by the conffile mechanism? If the maintainer thinks policy does not need to be followed here, why does he not propose a policy change? If policy and interpretation differ aren't we supposed to change one of them?
