> On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 20:35 -0700, Jan Setje-Eilers wrote: > > > I think this addresses my fears in the short term, though we do need to > > > see a revised spec which nails down specifics of how files may be > > > excluded from the archive. > > > > I suspect it should be all editable files as well as all driver.conf > > files (editable or not) in the archive. I'll gather some data on this > > and will update the spec accordingly. > > You mentioned in a side conversation that you had heard that there was a > good reason why we packaged many driver.conf files as non-editable but > still occasionally told people to edit them anyway. > > If at all possible it would be very helpful to chase down the origin of > that folklore, as what I'm hearing about likely changes coming in the > packaging/patching/upgrade space suggests that the ground underneath > that folklore is about to shift fairly dramatically.
I'm inclined to question that it was good reason, but as far as I can tell the hope is that as few .conf files as possible are actually used for customization. So they are by default of type f and are treated as though nothing in them needs to be preserved. This is obviously dangerous and I know of at least one recent example where we promoted a .conf file to e via a(n internal) bug. I've also been told that it's a similarly dubious upgrade performance optimization to upgrade as ON packages not calling out all their cross dependencies; something which is causing problems and is being addressed. That said, since we'd really like to eliminate driver.conf files in favor of moving all their data into smf, I'm inclined not to promote them further at this time. -jan
