On Mon, 5 Dec 2011, John Hasler wrote:
From debian-policy:
hi John,
Thank you for this very useful reply. I think that it is a good
practice, when giving an information, to give also the way to get it,
(it is sometimes enough to give the link to the doc, when available)
I installed the debian-policy package, and found a very clear definition
of conffiles, at:
/usr/share/doc/debian-policy/policy.html/ch-files.html
10.7.1 Definitions
configuration file
A file that affects the operation of a program, or provides site- or
host-specific information, or otherwise customizes the behavior of a
program. Typically, configuration files are intended to be modified
by the system administrator (if needed or desired) to conform to
local policy or to provide more useful site-specific behavior.
conffile
A file listed in a package's conffiles file, and is treated specially
by dpkg (see Details of configuration, Section 6.7).
The distinction between these two is important; they are not
interchangeable concepts. Almost all conffiles are configuration files,
but many configuration files are not conffiles.
As noted elsewhere, /etc/init.d scripts, /etc/default files, scripts
installed in /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly}, and cron
configuration installed in /etc/cron.d must be treated as configuration
files. In general, any script that embeds configuration information is
de-facto a configuration file and should be treated as such.
I just think that the name "conffiles" for the file containing the
list of conffiles is a little confusing. I would have preferred
conffiles.list (like sources.list)
--
Pierre Frenkiel
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