On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 11:17:48AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: > On Apr 23, Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> wrote: > > > The "packages drop files in /usr/*, sysadmins override in /etc" way of > > doing things is prevalent in the RPM world; in Debian, however, we > > traditionally have packages drop files in /etc, and let the maintainer > While this scheme was probably instigated by limitations in RPM, at this > point we have had multiple packages (kmod, systemd, udev for a start) > using it for years. > > Moving the sysctl.d default settings to /etc would be: > - a waste of developers time > - a gratuitous incompatibility with other distributions > - inconsistent with the documentation both inside and outside Debian > - inconsistent with other configuration files implementing this scheme
And: - inconsistent with every package in Debian not in that particular stack - hard for admins to make edits (one needs to guess this particular scheme is in place and find the file to modify) - failure to do configuration upgrades; in some cases this can result in serious security issues - fails whenever the files in /usr are rearranged - can't be managed sanely with usual configuration management systems (including raw git) - makes the history of changes done by you vs the package (on a non-overridden file) hard to audit All of this is caused by Red Hat having no support for upgrades: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/21964 # Red Hat does not support in-place upgrades between major versions 4, 5 and # 6 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (A major version is denoted by a whole # number version change. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red # Hat Enterprise Linux 6 are both major versions of Red Hat Enterprise # Linux). # # In-place upgrades across major releases do not preserve all system # settings, services or custom configurations. Consequently, Red Hat # strongly recommends fresh installations when upgrading from one major # version to another. # Red Hat currently supports only upgrades from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 # to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for specific/targeted use cases only. On the other hand, being able to effortlessly dist-upgrade is one of biggest reasons many of us have chosen Debian. Thus, what about we stop digging the hole and at least forbid this scheme for new packages? > There are also good arguments for having the whole default configuration > live in /usr and only local changes in /etc: e.g. this allows supporting > systems with an empty /etc, which greatly reduces the administrative > time needed to manage a large number of servers/containers. If all your boxes are identical and get their snowflake number from the net, /etc can come from the same place /var and /usr does. You do need to ensure the rest is unmodified anyway. Shoving things under the carpet doesn't help. > > configuration file that had been edited by a user is now also edited by > > the package maintainer, on Debian the system will ask how to handle it, > > rather than changing the defaults and not telling people (which can > > break in some circumstances). > In my experience as the maintainer of the packages which introduced this > scheme this has not been a noticeable problem. But beside the maintainer hat, do you wear a sysadmin hat sometimes? ᛗᛖᛟᚹ. -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Meow! ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ Collisions shmolisions, let's see them find a collision or second ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ preimage for double rot13!
