On 2024-12-20 at 11:42 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Maybe it would be more productive to take the preference disagreement as > given and then try to figure out how to proceed given that we're never > going to all agree on the best way of handling configuration files? Is > there some way that we can try to accomodate both groups?
Create a diversion from /etc to /usr/share/etc-conffiles-as-packaged Mkdir your almost-empty etc folder on /root/etc-changes Use a unionfs or union mount to combine /usr/share/etc-templates-as-packaged + /root/etc-changes mounted on /etc As the cherry on top of the cake, there could be a package that did this automatically. The trickiest part is probably that, for early daemons to correctly use that /etc, you may need to do that early in the boot process, in the initrd, which is less comfortable to code. Alternatively, perhaps a stub config on /etc would be enough for bootstrapping this (systemd might interfere with this, though). (*) I'm not sure the dpkg-divert mechanism would be able to handle a diversion of /etc, but adding such support if missing would be simple and *consistent* with the rest of the system.
