Hi, On Fri, 2024-12-20 at 13:00 +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote: > Ansgar ๐, le ven. 20 dรฉc. 2024 12:01:24 +0100, a ecrit: > > On Fri, 2024-12-20 at 11:50 +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote: > > > What I completely fail to understand is why people would want to not > > > see any file in /etc. What harm does it *actually* cause? > > > > It makes it hard to see what was actually configured: there is random > > configuration bits, possibly from a random older version of the > > package, intermixed with local configuration. > > > > With empty-/etc, you would (ideally) only have explicit local > > configuration in /etc which makes it much, much easier to see what the > > local admin changed to diagnose problems, prepare upgrades and so on. > > This is practically impossible now. > > ucf should be able to provide this?
No, first you would need something on top of ucf. Then you would need to make sure admins don't keep parts from random older versions which cause noise. And then you would need all packages to switch to ucf. Which AFAIU requires maintainer scripts which is something people would like to avoid as well. (To be fair: alternatives also require packaging changes.) > Put another way: it's not the presence of files in /etc that poses > problem. It's not having the shipped version at hand for comparing it. > Let's fix that rather than dropping something which is useful to admins. > > > It also avoids the problem of removed-but-not-purged packages. > > With files copied into /etc, you will still have configuration files > lying around, and *not tracked*. That problem doesn't exist if you don't copy unneeded files to /etc. Copying files to /etc and then writing logic to filter those out of some comparisons seems more complicated than just not copying needed stuff. It also means I don't have to use a special program to see what changed. Ansgar
