Timothy G Abbott <tabbott <at> MIT.EDU> writes: > Anders Kaseorg and I created a system of CDBS modules (which we've > tentatively packaged as the config-package-dev package) for creating > Debian configuration packages. By configuration packages, we mean > packages that configure an existing Debian system by applying dpkg-divert > to configuration files. Our configuration package system makes the > process of creating configuration packages efficient.
Uh, you can dpkg-divert conffiles, but not generally configuration files, since many won't even be known to dpkg. I must admit I'm a bit sceptical about a proposal on configuration, written by someone who lets this important distinction slip by... Later on you wrote something about symlinks, do you use them, too? Here's one more complication: While I think that "preserve local changes" also includes the symlink-or-not state of a file and thus must be respected by maintainer scripts, I do not think that this is usually done. In particular, every configuration file handling that was first written for sarge (where sed -i wouldn't work) probably used tempfiles and mv, and I have not seen a single case where the script checked whether it was dealing with a symlink. [...] > Since this package is adding a new feature to Debian itself, we think our > system should be discussed before we submit an ITP bug. There are some > changes to Debian that would enhance the effectiveness of this system, > (such as having all packages include md5sums and making ucf interact well > with dpkg-divert'ed configuration files), which should perhaps be > discussed in this context as well. It's not just ucf, it's also perfectly possible that a maintainer script edits a configuration file, e.g. after debconf prompting, in order to take over user changes from a related package's configuration file, or similar. How do you deal with that? Regards, Frank -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
