Hi Santiago. In principle I do not want to poke around in this issue, as you already stated your attitudes... anyway...
I also think it's imperfect to not upgrade such central files and not even warn the user that something has changed. (btw: Yes, I've read the FAQ) "Those files are configuration files, so they are completely under the control of the system admin." =>This applies to hundreds of other configuration files as well,.. even from "system-deep" packages... "Changes in the default files are not important enough to warn the user" => I can imagine some scenarios where this is important. Most recent example is the addition of support for /etc/profile.d in order to conform to LSB. People that do not regularly diff the base-files won't notice that changes to /etc/profile, and /etc/profile.d will remain non-functional on upgrades. I guess it's easy to think of similar issues. "to warn the user, as it is also policy that prompting should be reduced to a minimum" If just a warning would be given (which I personally would say is not enough) this wouldn't be prompting, would? And I guess changing of such basic files is important enough to give a short notice. Long story short.... I suggest to use Debians conffile mechanism for keeping those files up to date, because: 1) Personally I like the idea to be able (with considerable effort) to keep my Debian up to date and fresh as if I would just have installed a new version. We're not Windows where one needs to freshly install everything in order to be really up to date. 2) Of course I do not want to disallow users to have and keep their personal versions of these files. But as the user is asked whether he want's to keep/diff/replace etc. this should be fine. 3) End users / beginners probably never touch any base-files, thus they're probably never questioned at all. Experts however are probably able to know what to do, when they're asked those kinds of question. They can diff and decide what they want. 4) Of course an expert can also manually go through base-files.postinst and diff and merge, but it's probably not always directly clear from the changelog (and not everybody reads them or uses apt-listchanges), so it's more effort if one always has to check this. 5) I guess these are the regular files from base-files: /etc/issue.net /etc/issue /etc/debian_version /etc/dpkg/origins/debian /etc/host.conf /usr/share/base-files/profile /usr/share/base-files/motd /usr/share/base-files/dot.bashrc /usr/share/base-files/motd.md5sums /usr/share/base-files/info.dir /usr/share/base-files/dot.profile /usr/share/base-files/nsswitch.conf /usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2.1 /usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0 /usr/share/common-licenses/GFDL-1.3 /usr/share/common-licenses/GFDL-1.2 /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 /usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic /usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2 /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3 /usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-3 /usr/share/doc/base-files/FAQ /usr/share/common-licenses/GFDL /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL /usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL (excluding the documentation of base-files itself within /usr/share/doc/base-files/) So from these 27 files, 7 are never updated... => over 25% of the files for which base-files is ___actually intended for___, are never updated.... So perhaps, please reconsider your opinion on this :) Cheers, Chris.
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
