On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 11:36 AM David Cantrell <dcantr...@redhat.com> wrote: > > On 12/8/23 10:25, Stephen Gallagher wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 9:58 AM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek > > <zbys...@in.waw.pl> wrote: > >> > >> Hi, > >> > >> There is a long-term goal of moving packaged files out of /etc, so that > >> only actual local configuration remains in /etc. This has some advantages: > >> > >> - Local configuration, i.e. the result of local administrative actions, > >> is nicely split from static configuration that is part of package > >> payload. > >> 'find /etc' will show what is special to this local system, while > >> 'find /usr' lists stuff that is part of packages and the same between > >> systems. > >> - We can support "factory reset" at the system level, i.e. do 'rm -rf /etc' > >> to return everything to distro defaults. We're not there _yet_, but it > >> works with a surprisingly large subset of packages. > >> - We can support "factory reset" at a package level, by removing all the > >> configuration and state of an individual package, without reinstalling it > >> (possibly combined with some tmpfiles.d config to recreate things > >> automatically.) > >> - It becomes easier to build systems which are delivered as a stand-alone > >> /usr-partition. This could be ostree-style systems, or image-based > >> systems > >> with the /usr-partition read-only and protected by dm-verity. We're not > >> there _yet_, but many people are experimenting with this. > >> > >> When one looks in /etc, many of the files there are not "configuration". > >> For example, /etc/services is a list of port:service mappings, and people > >> maybe used to edit that twenty years ago, but now it's just a static file > >> that just as well may be somewhere under /usr/lib/. The same is also > >> true for /etc/bash_completion.d/ — people do not edit completion scripts. > >> Most of those have been moved to /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/, > >> but there's still a dozen or so in /etc. > >> > > > > One thing that is becoming much more common is for us to ship such > > static files in /usr/lib and include a default symlink in /etc for > > those packages whose presence there is effectively API (for example > > /etc/os-release is a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release, similarly > > /etc/resolv.conf). I think this is a very good approach and one that > > we should probably look at formalizing in the packaging guidelines. > > I'd rather see defaults under somewhere in /usr/share rather than /usr/lib. >
I agree with this. I really would rather it be in /usr/share. > > That being said, there are files like /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/pam.d/* > > and /etc/fstab which are both API *and* sometimes see manual updates. > > These are some of the cases that are going to make getting to an empty > > /etc very hard to finish off. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we > > can take care of in the meantime, but getting the last 1% of packages > > done is going to take a lot of inter-distro conversations. > > We could just have an /etc tree like we see now but in /usr/share/etc > (or /usr/etc, but then I get IRIX nightmares) and your local overrides > exist in /etc. Things like fstab will probably just have to always be > host-dependent so they will always exist in /etc. > We're currently not allowed to use /usr/etc (not that I like that path anyway) because it breaks RPM-OSTree. My understanding is that this directory is reserved by RPM-OSTree for storing pristine copies of /etc content for each OSTree commit. > For this to be really clean and nice, everything that drops a file in > /etc needs to handle the "read in the default; then read in the optional > local overrides" model. I know a lot of stuff already does this, but > some things don't. It would be a nice goal to aim for and maybe we can > submit patches to upstream projects where the functionality is missing. > Indeed. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
