Russ Allbery <rra <at> debian.org> writes: > But right now with configuration in /etc if you have changed *any* > configuration setting, you then get prompted for *all* configuration > changes in the package, which I think is Enrico's point. And I agree, I > kind of like that behavior. Configuration settings can interact in > unexpected ways, so if I've had to customize the configuration, I kind of > like knowing when other defaults change. They may affect the thing I had > to customize.
I agree that there is an issue with old configuration that may become stale. However, I don't think the dpkg prompts are enough of a solution to the issue to be worth supporting on that basis. If you add custom configuration for a program then you also have to maintain that configuration to some degree, but it's fairly easy to forget that. A program may not have a default configuration file listing all the default options the binary uses, so you can't rely on a default configuration file changing to alert you to a possible need to update your custom configuration. Practically all programs, even those that have default configuration files listing the default value of every single option, contain changing behavior choices relevant to custom configuration in the program code itself. A common use for custom configuration is to work around a case where the program does not work right by default; a common upstream improvement is to make the program work by default in more cases. When that happens, the custom configuration should be removed or it's likely to cause problems in the future, but such improvements are often not accompanied by any visible option changes. Moving the default configuration out of /etc also makes it easier to investigate any problems possibly related to local configuration, as it becomes simpler to check the behavior with known default distro configuration. Perhaps a first step to alert users about local configuration possibly needing updating would be to make apt-listchanges able to list packages being updated that seem to have local configuration. At least you could check for modified conffiles owned by the package and for package-owned directories under /etc that are nonempty (excluding false positives such as unmodified package-installed files when possible). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/loom.20111231t180240-...@post.gmane.org
