On Fri, 19 Dec 1997, Adrian Bridgett wrote: > On Fri, Dec 19, 1997 at 01:56:35PM -0500, Scott Ellis wrote: > > On Fri, 19 Dec 1997, Santiago Vila wrote: > > [snip policy] > > > > > > Could somebody please explain the rationale for having *all* > > > /etc/init.d/* scripts as conffiles? > > [snip] > > > You can deactivate OR CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR of the program by modifying the > > script. If it isn't a conffile, this will break every time the package is > > upgraded (I frequently tweak the behavior of the init.d scripts). I know > > I'd get seriously annoyed if my changes were suddenly overridden. The > > only inconvenience there is the occasional prompting about a file I've > > changed being updated. I far prefer that small warning to having programs > > change behavior under my nose. You only got the warning because a package > > was changed to conform to policy and added a conffile that wasn't there. > > For the most part, dpkg does a good job of not bothering you about files > > that you haven't changed or which haven't changed upstream. > > What about "dpkg-divert"? Sure - some people do edit /etc/init.d/whatever > (particularly "network"), however there are many files in /etc/init.d that > the vast majority of people won't change. If some behaviour needs to change, > they may not install the new version (I normally say "N" to replace > conffiles and then go through manually to see what's changed). On my > system, there are more than fifty scripts in init.d, I've changed one.
"The vast majority of people" and "everyone" are two different beasts. May I ask why you want to BREAK MY CURRENT SETUP? It works, it doesn't need changing. I don't want to use dpkg-divert, many people don't understand it fully (I don't, but I haven't needed to use it. I trust I could figure it out easy enough). The current system WORKS under the principal of least suprise. Having to specifically register a file I've changed doesn't. And stopping these files from being conffiles will step on anyone who has assumed their changes are safe because they are conffiles.
