On Sun, 4 Mar 2012, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: > So if I understand you right: > - the canonical place where all these dirs are created is base-files > - the migration (of old systems) is however done by initscripts.
I would say that's not completely exact. For /var/run and friends, base-files is not canonical at all. For a while, initscripts was the only package taking care of this. No matter if you installed a new system or upgraded an existing one, the end result depended solely on initscripts. Then Roger Leigh asked me to modify the current code in base-files because doing so made things easier for chroots and similar cases, but we should still consider that the transition of /var/run is made by initscripts. > We've had previously many issues, where files/permissions/etc. from > base-files changed, but were not updated (like now with nsswitch.conf). Note: The change in nsswitch.conf has just been reverted in base-files_6.7. > You're arguments were always that you don't wanna make such changes > automatically, as they might not be what the user wants and the things > like ufw or so, would be overkill for a basic package like base-files, > right? > > What about adding a small script, that just checks for differences > between the current and "fresh" state all these > files/dirs/permissions/etc. and reports them to the user and also what > he must do to bring it up to date? The number of "configuration files which are not conffiles in dpkg sense" in base-files is too small to justify writing a script for that. Whenever base-files creates a file for the first time to never touch it again, the original is taken from /usr/share/base-files. You can take a look at that directory if you are worried about this. However, if this is a problem to worry about at all, it is certainly not limited to base-files. There are a lot of things that might change if you compare an upgraded system with another one installed from scratch. I imagine that a script to check differences would end up asking the users things like this: Your root partition is ext3 but the current default is ext4. Do you want to convert your root partition to ext4? (y/n) As you see, there are things that are not so easy to "upgrade", so whatever script that you could create would never be complete. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]

