Le lundi 16 novembre 2015, 10:27:14 Marc Haber a écrit :
> On Sun, 15 Nov 2015 23:10:11 +0100, Wouter Verhelst
> <wou...@debian.org> wrote:
> >On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 05:47:41PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
> >> Regarding dpkg, its conffile handling is IMO beyond repair, it should
> >> be deprecated and later removed.
> >
> >Could you explain why?
>
> - It is documented to fail miserably when a conffile belonging to
> package A gets modified by package B. This is not relevant for
> Debian proper (since we forbid this constellation in Policy to cater
> for this shortcoming of our central package management tool), but
> making this possible would make package maintenance (e.g. sharing of
> a single conffile between packages) muche easier, and it would allow
> local administrators to have local "configuration" packages to roll
> out for basic site configuration without a full-fledged
> configuration management system.
There are conf files shared by various packages too, like
/etc/ethers is used by at least net-tools, nmap, dnsmasq-base .
There's also an accountability problem, because it's sometimes hard
to guess which packages own some files in /etc .
The dynamic files are not listed/matched with "dpkg -L" / "dpkg -S".
One way to find this info is doing
$ grep /etc/<file> /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.postrm
or
$ find /usr/share/man -type f -exec zgrep -l /etc/<file> {} \;
but that's not at all obvious.
(that's what I use to build the "cruft database").
But adding dynamic file support in dpkg is a lot of work.
Alexandre
