Christoph Berg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Re: Frank Küster 2006-07-21 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> I believe that we need to rephrase the TeX Policy. But this requires >> not just to specifiy that each "cfg" file must be in /etc. Instead, I >> think we need to find a distinction between >> >> - files that can be used to modify the behavior of programs, and/or >> files that make sense to customize site-wide behavior on a multiuser >> system (I just cannot find an example of a file that would only >> fulfill the second half of the sentence) >> >> => must go to /etc > > I remeber that a tetex update last year (maybe even longer ago) had > prompted me and several others for about a dozen changed conffiles I > had never heard of before and I surely had never touched. Similarly, I > have seen some debconf prompts that asked me about tex settings I > wouldn't ever use. I might have run at the wrong debconf priority > there, but the point is: imho the vast majority of tetex users will > never touch any of the settings and be happy with the defaults, so > please make sure that any new conf(ig) file you introduce does not > prompt the user.
Exactly these things caused us to make the move. I admit, it was also caused by design errors we (or even former maintainers in the old times) made, and it might be possible to have a package with 300 configuration files in /etc. I don't expect that we're going to manage it properly, though, especially as long as ucf's functionality isn't integrated with dpkg. > Likewise, if you are going to overwrite a file > outside of /etc on upgrade that one out of 1000 users might have > touched, please don't prompt, but tell the users in README.Debian to > use dpkg-divert. Imho, in this case, customizing for the > might-have-changed case doesn't serve the (other) users who are just > confused by the questions. In this case, as has been pointed out, we were wrong in treating the file like any TeX input file, and it should have been a conffile. Probably unchanged by 99.99% of the users. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
