Santiago Vila <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Sorry, I didn't explain well. I was referring to the "format" of the file, > i.e. the allowed internal structure of it.
I guess my opinion is that if you make it not a conffile, then you shift the burden onto the package maintainers to make sure and remeber whenever they change the format of the file, that they have to prompt the user in the postinst rather than using the existing conffile mechanism which was designed for this. This can be tricky if the existing format doesn't have a version number. Basically the postinst has to keep a history of all the changes and upon upgrade, see if the user is upgrading from a version that had a different format and if so, prompt. This is IMO messy and error prone. > Once you have chosen your desired mouse type, it is a good thing > that dpkg does not ask you over and over again about this file. Given my understanding of conffiles, if apt is prompting over and over again (and I agree that I've seen that a number of times), then either the apt people are changing sources.list upstream all the time, or something is broken that needs fixing. If the former, then the first question IMO is "Why?" rather than "Why is sources.list a conffile?". If the latter, then we should hunt the bug. > 1. Is http://http.us.debian.org a reasonable default for *everybody* or > just for the US? This shouldn't matter. IMO they need to just put *something* "standard" in there, and just leave it alone. If they do that then you should never get prompted about it. I guess I would agree that sources.list shouldn't be a conffile if we didn't have entries that we could put in sources.list that would almost never need to be changed. But if we just put us.debian.org/stable and nonus.debian.org/stable then these shouldn't need to be touched for a long time. The question isn't whether or not these are reasonable defaults for everyone. The question is "Are they good enough examples so that we shouldn't have to touch them for the forseeable future?". -- Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930
