On Friday 17 Sep 2010 11:17:07 Tim Cutts wrote:
> On 17 Sep 2010, at 10:59 am, Davide Brini wrote:
> > Well, if my custom file is in place before the package is installed,
> > could it be overwritten with the default one by the package
> > installation? (I haven't tried to be honest)
>
> That depends, I suspect, on how you invoke your package manager, and what
> its default behaviour is. For Debian-derived distros, invoking aptitude
> with the following option forces it to preserve existing config files, if
> they're different from the package's own version.
>
> -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold"
>
> On Debian systems, I use a script I called "niagi" (non-interactive apt-get
> install), which does this and a few other things to make it work smoothly
> with cfengine 2, but I imagine it would also work with cfengine 3.:
>
> #!/bin/bash
>
> DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
> /usr/bin/aptitude -R -y \
> -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" \
> -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold" \
> install ${*} >/dev/null
>
> The result of this is that aptitude never asks any questions. If the conf
> files are already present, they are preserved (dpkg will install newer
> versions as conf-file.dpkg-new instead, so you can examine whether any
> changes might be needed to your policy files later), and if the conf file
> is not present, it will simply choose all of the package's defaults (or
> whatever your debconf settings are, although we don't tend to use those
> because cfengine doesn't have, as far as I know, a built-in method for
> manipulating debconf settings - they're somewhat redundant anyway when
> you're controlling the config files directly)
This is a clever solution, thanks for sharing.
Since I think I understand the different views about cfengine's expected
behavior for package promises, I have opened a feature request for adding an
option to have the exit status count towards declaring the promise kept or
not. That way users could chose to have either behaviors, which I think would
accommodate fans of both camps.
--
D.
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