Ansgar 🙀, le ven. 20 déc. 2024 13:07:36 +0100, a ecrit: > On Fri, 2024-12-20 at 13:00 +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote: > > Ansgar 🙀, le ven. 20 déc. 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.
? Can't ucf be added an option to do that? > Then you would need to make sure admins don't keep parts from random > older versions which cause noise. But that's only for admins to see that from ucf's new option output and act accordingly. > 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.) That's one of my points: this thread is already considering to ask everybody to be doing something about it... > > 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. When removing a package, it should be completely fine to remove the configuration files when it is noticed that they have not been modified. > 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. It seems way more often to me that I want to easily inspect/modify/amend the configuration in /etc (without having to look whatever other place to find out about the default configuration) than checking what changes I have made to /etc which I may not want any more. And thus having a special program for the latter looks completely fine to me. That's what people do with etckeeper and such already. Samuel
