Public bug reported:
At the Ohio LinuxFest in 2005, I spoke at length with one of the Ubuntu
developers who convinced me to convert to Ubuntu. Apparently, he
convinced me under false pretences.
See, I had been using Gentoo, and one of the most nightmarish things
about it was the breakages that resulted from package upgrades. A lot
of the trouble had to do with minor changes I would make to config
files. For instance, PHP has an option to make all GET and POST
variables globals. I had a bunch of old code that required this, so I
would always change the option. Whenever PHP would be upgraded, I'd
have to hassle with replacing the old config file with the new one and
making my manual changes (because there were lots of defaults that were
changed with the upgrade). This was much worse for many other packages.
When explaining this to the Ubuntu developer, he told me that Ubuntu
takes care of all of this automatically. The post-install or pre-
install script, he said, would compare the old and new config files, and
if there were simple changes to options common for both versions of the
package, then the script would automatically propagate the changes to
the new version of the config file.
I have since learned that what he told me isn't true.
So, here's my suggestion: In your efforts to make Ubuntu even easier
for the average person to use, please develop a system for propagating
config-file changes across package versions, without losing the changes
that come along with the new package. In other words, do an intelligent
merge.
If anyone is interested, I would be happy to work on this! It might not
be in the language you want (I don't know Python or Perl), but I could
provide you with a tool that would take an old default config, an old
modified config, and a new default config and produce a new modified
config that, under most circumstances (that would have to be decided on
a per-package basis) would work properly.
An important factor that would help out here considerably (also part of
Ubuntu's effort to become more friendly) is to discourage users from
making manual config changes from a text editor. Rather, most packages
should have configuration tools that offer the user a graphical menu-
driven way to modify settings. With this, config changes are
sufficiently well controlled that the merge tool should work flawlessly
most of the time.
Anyone interested?
** Affects: Ubuntu
Importance: Undecided
Status: Unconfirmed
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Meta-bug: Package upgrades don't automagically merge config file changes
https://launchpad.net/bugs/69412
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