On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 3:00 PM, 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
> change them in place. This is possible, because our package management
> system deals better with changed files than does RPM (which must work
> silently, rather than confirming things with the user).
s/package management system deals better/package management system
deals differently/
rpm doesn't have a problem with config file handling and deals with
config files in a similar way that dpkg uses the "conffile" attribute
to deal with them. rpm spec files use two (one-and-a-half?) macros:
- "%config": "foo.conf" is replaced in an upgrade and saved as
"foo.conf.rpmsave";
- "%config(noreplace)": "foo.conf" isn't replaced in an upgrade and
the new "foo.conf" is installed as "foo.conf.rpmnew".
So rpm isn't a factor; upstreams drop files into "/usr/lib" because
Red Hat is pushing the concept of all/almost-all distro-provided files
in "/usr".
[OT: If I've *had* a complaint about
"/usr/lib/{modules-load.d,sysctl.d,tmpfiles.d}", it's that, when I
first looked for them on Debian, I expected them to be under "/lib"
and not "/usr/lib" given that systemd installs its boot-time files
under "/lib/systemd".]
