Manoj Srivastava <sriva...@ieee.org> writes: > On Sun, Jan 03 2010, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I don't believe that listing symlinks as conffiles works properly at >> the moment. See #421344. It doesn't make any sense to list a >> directory as a conffile. I think that exhausts all the non-regular >> files that can be in a Debian package. > A conffile is, after all, a configuration file. As such, it > contains configuration data, and user changes to such data is what > policy is concerned about preserving. Merely the presence or absence of > a inode or a link does not rise to the level of "configuration data", > in my view. Why add restrictions on what people can do? I think a symlink created by the package in /etc should be handled like a conffile in the sense that if the sysadmin changes the symlink to point to a different path, that's a change that should be preserved. As I recall, that's the scenario that prompted Bug#421344 originally. Currently, I believe such changes are not preserved on package upgrade. > Now, if the target of the symlink is under /etc, then the target > is really the configuration file, if the target does not lie under > /etc, we have a policy violation. Symlinks in /etc pointing to files not in /etc are used now, so I'm not sure they should be Policy violations. /etc/nologin is the canonical example. Depending on how and whether Debian adopts upstart, we may have other cases. >> Symlinks as conffiles should ideally work. I think it's just a bug in >> dpkg that they don't. > While it could be made to work, I am not sure I agree that the > result would require the same protection in policy. > I am willing to be persuaded otherwise on this. Well, I think all that Policy requires for configuration files that would be relevant to symlinks is: * If the administrator removes it, it stays removed on package upgrade. * If the administrator changes it, which in the case of a symlink just means pointing it to a different path, that change is either preserved or prompted about. Both of those seem feasible and reasonable to me. (Of course, someone would need to do the work, and I don't think it's the highest-priority dpkg development goal.) I'm not sure what the implications of changing the symlink to be a real file or a directory would be. (I'm not sure what happens if an administrator changes a regular conffile to a directory.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-dpkg-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
