On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 2:52 AM, Christian Seiler wrote: > 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
I always thought that Debian shipping what is essentially documentation in /etc is weird. This stuff belongs in the manual pages or other documentation. > If in any of these cases the default in the code changes, the behavior > of the software changes. Indeed, most default configuration is in one of /usr/*bin /usr/lib /usr/share and isn't in a form that can be version controlled or compared between versions. > In my experience, having to merge configuration files on updates > has cost me a _lot_ of time. Especially since most packages don't use ucf, which has 3-way merge. > Personally, from a user point of view I really like the "vendor > defaults in /usr, user configuration in /etc" scheme. Likewise. > 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. I've always found ucf's 3-way merge to do exactly what I want. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
