Hello List, I'm aware that this may be an invitation to be flamed, but I would like to suggest an addition to the Debian policy: to discourage packages from creating, installing or modifying configuration files altogether when at all possible. The reasoning behind this is that configuration file handling is (in my limited experience) one of the least clean aspects of Debian packaging, mainly due to the fact that configuration files are something that users are expected (or at least explicitly allowed) to create themselves; the Debian Policy Manual already discusses a number of problems associated with packages handling configuration files. Another problem is that it makes reproducible setups more painful by encouraging a profilation of configuration files which are part manually, part automatically generated.
Some alternatives to packages creating configuration files (often best handled in co-operation with upstream) are: * Ensuring that the package has reasonable defaults if no configuration file is supplied. * Cleanly separate distribution configuration files (i.e. in /usr/lib) and user configuration files (i.e. in /etc), whereby the second overrides the first. * Have the package do autoconfiguration when it is run, allowing the autoconfiguration to be overridden by user configuration if appropriate, and caching any bits which are not reasonably to do at every start-up (e.g. because they involve long disk operations) in var-files or dotfiles (noting that the last are also rather ugly and suffer from many of the same problems, especially if there is no clean separation between user and application-generated dotfiles). I await replies with interest. Regards, Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
