Hi Clint, On Mon, Jul 05, 2021 at 11:46:58AM +0000, Clint Adams wrote: > Why not put the shells.d directory in /etc so that dpkg's conffiles > handling can be used to preserve admin changes?
Thank you for looking at it in more detail. It's good question with a non-obvious answer. TL;DR: Been there. Done that. Don't repeat. The issue is that files in /etc are conffiles. conffiles persist on package removal. Say you remove ksh. /etc/shells.d/ksh would be kept and thus /etc/shells would continue to contain ksh. Only on purge of ksh, ksh would disappear from /etc/shells. That's not what we want here. Beyond this, I've been burned by dpkg bugs when it comes to activating triggers on conffiles. See #88010 for the long story. Possibly they're all sorted out now. Maybe not. Also keep in mind that an administrator modifying a conffile will not automatically invoke the trigger. So you may end up with a situation where you modify /etc/shells.d/ksh. It doesn't take effect. You install screen and suddenly /etc/shells is updated with your modification performed months ago. Let me know if something else pops up. Helmut
