On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Julian Gilbey wrote: > I think this proposal is silly: for something like the cases you > mention, it is obvious that they should not be conffiles, but should > be created by the postinst if they do not already exist. It would > clearly be very stupid for these to be conffiles. In particular, > given the update-mime program, /etc/mailcap should obviously not be a > conffile. And as it is, the maintainer should change that -- but > changing policy isn't going to make that happen any more quickly.
I also think this proposal should not be needed, but considering that nobody managed so far to convince the mime-support maintainer that /etc/mailcap being a conffile is really bad, it seems it is. What is obvious for you and me may not be obvious for everybody. This is one of the reasons policy exist in the first place. If it is obvious for you that this is the right thing to do, then please second the proposal. Having something like this written in policy will not only help us to convince the maintainer of mime-support that this is indeed a bug (currently he has it as a wishlist item), but also will help us to prevent similar cases in the future. I still remember the days when /etc/passwd was a conffile..., this happened from november 1996 to september 1997 at least. Are you really sure this is "obvious" for everybody? I am not. Thanks. -- "62064fed87a113803af3c573060c8576" (a truly random sig)
