Josh Triplett writes: > Which effectively means the admin should never delete any existing entry > in the file, only add their own.
It's a configuration file that is not supposed to ever be changed. If there are local changes, an admin will likely not include updates provided by newer packages. Sadly there are quite a bunch of files in /etc that aren't really configuration files :( > Much like /usr/share/misc/pci.ids and other such databases that record > the state of the real world and standards committees, editing these > files at all seems questionable. It is. > Suppose, hypothetically, that these > files all moved to /usr/share/misc/ , and then libnss_files.so learned > to read both /etc/$file and /usr/share/misc/$file , with the former not > existing by default? That assumes the files are only accessed via libnss_files.so. There are however programs that just access the files directly. You also require a particular configuration of nsswitch.conf: what if I look up services via ldap? :) One can create /etc/services.local and have a service that merges services.local with the distribution-provided services to /var/lib/netbase/services. /etc/services could then be a symlink to that file. (If services.local is empty, /var/lib/netbase/services could just be a symlink as well to save disk space.) Or one can just hope a reasonable admin doesn't touch these files (the current state). Ansgar
