While composing an answer to Manoj, and before I had come to a conclusion for myself, I wrote the parts below. They're probably boring now, but just in case they're going to be needed again, here they are in the archive.
As a matter of fact, the common extension for "configuration files" in a TeX system seems to be cfg, not cnf, but there are more, and many don't have a special extension, but are simply in a directory config, or just anywhere. Map files are also a file that one might want to change. This gives an estimate of about 300 configuration files in tetex-base and tetex-extra, but there might be more: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ dlocate -L tetex-extra tetex-base | egrep texmf-tetex.*(cfg|config|map) | wc -l 296 On the other hand, there are files in config directories which on a properly handled system should never ever be changed. ini files are one important example, so we're "down" to 260 files: $ dlocate -L tetex-extra tetex-base | egrep texmf-tetex.*(cfg|config|map) | egrep -v ini$ | wc -l 259 So let us investigate whether upstream in fact intended these files to be configuration files, be it on a per-document, per-user, or site-wide basis. The LPPL, under which many of these files are licensed, poses some restrictions on modified/derived works, but has a special clause that certain files can be made exempt from these restrictions, and may be distributed in modfied form freely - e.g. to create customized distributions. I think if a file in a LPPL'ed package is exempt from these restrictions, it means it is intended to be a configuration file by the upstream author, otherwise it not. Judging from this condition, many files with extension .cfg are not configuration files, e.g. /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/microtype/*.cfg or seminar.con. Now there are, of course, also (CTAN) packages under different licenses, e.g. GPL, without such a distinction. It's hard to judge which files should be configuration files. Look through documentation, newsgroups, try to contact upstream,... During sarge development, we found out that it makes some sense to modify map files to get some particular pattern of font inclusion in PDF documents. Later we decided that this had bad side effects (I forgot the details) and were glad to be able to move them back. This might require some complicated code changes to the debian-specific or upstream font-handling scripts. Furthermore, these files only change rarely. If they do, it's often a larger code rewrite, and cfg files must be rewritten, too - I expect they often must be exchanged with the upstream package. -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
