On 04/25/2017 07:59 PM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> In my experience as a user of some of those packages, it is intensely
> annoying that a package upgrade suddenly changes some behaviour in ways
> that I dislike and it's difficult to figure out what changed, because
> the configuration is not in /etc.
But this is a much more general problem. A lot of software in Debian
ships configuration files in /etc that look like this:
#
# Setting ABC
#
#ABC = 123
Where 123 is the default value (in the code of the application), and
in the version of the configuration file there isn't even a single line
that isn't a comment or blank.
Or they install a config file that only contains 3 settings or so, and
the user would have to manually add all the other 60 settings the
software supports if they wanted to change them.
If in any of these cases the default in the code changes, the behavior
of the software changes. Granted, in the first case you might be able
to figure that out if the developers of the software thought to also
update the comments in the config file - but if the software ships
multiple configuration files and the change was in a file you didn't
touch, dpkg will upgrade that file anyway.
Furthermore there are also behavioral changes in software that are not
encoded in configuration, but rather just in code.
And finally, sometimes you don't even configure things, because you're
happy with the defaults, and _then_ a default changes.
So in practice I don't see that as being that big of a benefit here.
In my experience, having to merge configuration files on updates
has cost me a _lot_ of time. At the same time I can't recall a single
instance in the last couple of years where the default behavior of an
application I used changed and I really wanted to revert that via
configuration. [1] I'm sure it has happened occasionally, but nothing
that stuck to my mind.
Personally, from a user point of view I really like the "vendor
defaults in /usr, user configuration in /etc" scheme. If I look at
current /etc, 99% of the stuff in there is stuff I've never ever
configured or even looked at. I rather like the vision of /etc being
a directory where just my local changes to the system configuration
are stored. Maybe that's influenced by the way I see conffile
handling: I consider dpkg's default behavior to be horrible (no copy
of the original is saved anywhere, so no 3-way merge is
possible [2]), I never completely grokked ucf as a user (I stumbled
upon ucf prompts on updates of some packages that used it, and only
once it actually did manage to do what I wanted automatically, the
other times I found the way you could manually intervene in the
merging process there to be highly unintuitive), and I gave up on
trying to understand ucf from a package maintainer's perspective a
long time ago.
Regards,
Christian
[1] I do recall behavior changing for the worse without a
configuration possibility to revert that though. There's a
reason I packaged gtk3-nocsd. ;-)
[2] Don't get me wrong: I consider RPM's behavior to be worse than
dpkg's, but that doesn't mean I have to like either one.
