On Thu, 10 May 2012, Ben Hutchings wrote: > In the etc-overrides-lib model, program defaults and local > configuration are effectively being merged every time the program > starts.
This is only the case if the configuration files are fine grained enough that overrides to a configuration file wouldn't also need to incorporate upstream/packaging changes. In such a case, etc-overrides-non-etc makes perfect sense, and you wouldn't normally distribute a configuration file at all (or if you did, it'd just contain commented, current default values for commonly altered values). In cases where the configuration files are not (or co-mingled with application logic), then etc-overrides-lib is the same as running dpkg with --force-conf-old and having the configuration files in /etc. > Maybe users ought to be able to request notification when the > defaults change. But isn't that true regardless of whether those > defaults are written in the configuration file format or as part of > the program itself? Sure. I personally think it'd be nice to know if the defaults changed too when I'd altered them. But doing that is difficult when the defaults aren't already specified in a configuration file. Handling configuration files as configuration files isn't that difficult. Don Armstrong -- Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. -- Richard Feynman http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120510215207.gf3...@rzlab.ucr.edu