On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 08:48:54 +0200 Ansgar Burchardt <ans...@debian.org> wrote: > 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.
Which is a good argument for them not being in /etc. > > 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. That's a bug to be fixed. > One can create /etc/services.local and have a service that merges > services.local with the distribution-provided services to > /var/lib/netbase/services. Emphatically not, no; let's not have a *service* running to do this, when we can just read both files.
