On 11/05/2012 19:03, Thomas Goirand wrote: > On 05/12/2012 12:22 AM, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote: >> I find your attitude assumes users always have the knowledge and the >> time to investigate everything. This is not the reality. >> >> Sincerly, >> > Not at all. Anyone without the knowledge will not be able to > restore anything anyway. > > Anyone with the knowledge will know how to get the original file. > Yes, it will take more time to do that, but do you think this is > the kind of operation you need to do every day? I'd say, once > every 5 years maybe? > > Very rarely, I do a purge then reinstall, but never it happened > to me that my system was in such state that I had to recover > by hand a configuration file, using the single user boot. Did > this happen to you at some point? Anyone else?
Yes, several times indeed. Most times when upgrading network packages at the same time. > I'm not bashing the idea so much, as it is a harmless one, I just > think it is simply a useless feature, and I don't think it's worth > investing any human time on this. I think it would be really great to have some program being able to output all manual differences to all /etc files really useful for maintenance. I used to do that, but some rapidly evolving configuration files make it quickly unmaintainable (php.ini comes to mind: I always have to put back the upload_max_filesize to a superior value, and this one-line difference makes something that should be really, really simple (upgrading php, even using stable+security) a pain because one gets manually prompted about the differences, even if they are trivial to merge. -- Jean-Christophe Dubacq
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