On Fri, 2003-04-18 at 10:28, Steve Greenland wrote: > > I propose a different solution to this problem, which conforms much more > > with policy, while still allowing debconf to be used as much as > > possible. > > But that's not the solution.
Yep, I agree completely. So let's talk about solutions. One might be to create a third class of configuration files; let's call them "managed configuration files". Now, managed configfiles can either be conffiles (i.e. included in the package) or configuration files. The key difference is that the admin has full, standardized control over how packages can overwrite these files. For example, we'd have files /etc/conffiles/managed and /etc/conffiles/unmanaged. The /etc/conffiles/managed file would itself be a conffile that would list which configuration files a package can freely overwrite. If the configuration file is a conffile, then dpkg will never prompt even if the file is locally modified; it will just replace it. If it's a configuration file, then the package is free to overwrite any changes in its postinst. I know for sure on my system I'd put all the X keymaps and TeX stuff in here. (Hm, we should probably support globs in this file). Likewise, /etc/conffiles/unmanaged is a list of files that should explicitly never be overwritten by packages. Oh, and we'll want a file like /etc/conffiles/default, which says how to handle config files not in either list above. Obviously, I think Debian should default to config files being unmanaged. But if we end up implementing something like this, I might consider making the default to be managed for Debian Desktop. Or at least have a prompt about it. We'd need a few new tools in (say) dpkg for packages to use to determine whether or not a file is managed and stuff, but that's all mostly detail. Now, we can handle the two cases I posted; Hardcore Unix guy will install Debian, and can rest secure in the knowledge that his manual edits to anything in /etc/ will be preserved. Semi-experienced Newbie has a choice. He can explicitly make stuff managed if he wants. So, opinions? Yeah, it's kind of gross. But the way things are now is far worse.
