David Starner wrote: > Santiago Vila wrote: > > I never asked for a debconf interface (I explained in the bug report > > (#110980) a possible way to do it and it would take just a few lines > > of shell scripting). I just asked following policy. > > And making it a conffile but not is a huge improvement?
Sorry, but I can't parse the previous sentence. If you mean following policy is not a huge improvement over the current conffile status, well, it might well not be a huge improvement. But nowhere is written that improvements have to be huge before we decide to implement them. We do not reject improvements just because they are not "huge". Using a conffile and saying "I will not change this file anymore" is a poor "emulation" of the postinst-generated configuration file mechanism (whose main feature is that user is never asked a stupid question). The current default file is not empty. It has a reference to /usr/share/doc/locales/SUPPORTED.gz for example. If this were written in the FSSTND era, it would read /usr/doc/locales/SUPPORTED.gz instead. I think this shows that even the most minimal default configuration file might need a change from time to time, to be in sync with the latest policy, which invalidates the "I will not change the default file anymore" argument. It would be better if the default file which is installed by default were the best possible default file which may be written at release time, every release, without having to worry about whether or not we changed it from woody to woody+1. The conffile mechanism should only be used when it's useful to do so. If there is the smallest chance that dpkg asks a question for which the only logical answer is "no, I want to keep the current version", then it does not make sense to use a procedure which makes dpkg to ask a question. It's better to assume that the answer is no.
