On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 13:39:32 +0100 Ian Jackson
<ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Bill Allombert writes ("Bug#904248: Beginnings of a patch to add netbase to
> build-essential"):
> > What about the fact that these files are conffiles ?
>
> What about it ?
>
> My proposed wording about "longstanding and conventionally available
> service and protocol names and numbers" says that if the admin has
> modified the file they need to make sure their modified version isn't
> toally borked.
Which effectively means the admin should never delete any existing entry
in the file, only add their own.
It doesn't seem reasonable for a package to require a particular entry
in a conffile in order to build. Packages should contain that
information themselves.
Much like /usr/share/misc/pci.ids and other such databases that record
the state of the real world and standards committees, editing these
files at all seems questionable. Suppose, hypothetically, that these
files all moved to /usr/share/misc/ , and then libnss_files.so learned
to read both /etc/$file and /usr/share/misc/$file , with the former not
existing by default? (We could also switch to a faster lookup mechanism,
but let's not change too many things simultaneously.)
(This is separate from the problem that netbase should *still* not be
build-essential, as several have said on this thread. Personally, I'm
leaning increasingly in the direction of "even an explicit build-depends
on netbase should be treated as a sign of a bug in the package".)
