On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 2:55 PM, Ben Hutchings <b...@decadent.org.uk> wrote: > On Wed, 2017-04-26 at 07:53 -0400, Tom H wrote: >>> 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". > > I didn't know about this, and I'm pleased to see that this is (now) > possible. Is this documented somewhere? (I've never been able to find > documentation of RPM macros that isn't very old and incomplete.) I first used it with RHEL 3 for some company-developed apps but it might predate that. But Google says that it was available since at least RHL 9: http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/jw35/docs/rpm_config.html Fedora has an rpm draft doc: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Draft_Documentation/0.1/html/RPM_Guide/index.html >> So rpm isn't a factor; > > It is, because rpm is non-interactive and the above choice has to be > made by the packager and not the adminsitrator. It must've slipped my mind because I disable the interactivity. Indeed, dpkg has the advantage that an administrator can change the behavior at run-time, for the current transaction or for all, but that flexibility doesn't give dpkg an advantage over rpm for dropping config files in "/etc" rather than in "/usr/lib". >> upstreams drop files into "/usr/lib" because >> Red Hat is pushing the concept of all/almost-all distro-provided files >> in "/usr".
