On 2-May-08, at 11:37 AM, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
I think it's more complex than that. It isn't obvious -- at least not to me -- which files in /etc are "owned" by the system (and hence are fair game for auto-replacement), and which are owned by the administrator. (I raised similar questions a few months ago about the power management scripts.) We need a clear, clean way to make that distinction, and to make it obvious to the community.
I've modified the build for my systems such that any and all scripts and script fragments in /etc, including especially /etc/rc.d/* are considered to be owned by the system, _unless_ they have a name matching *.local (and I added /etc/*.local hooks where necessary).
The primary reason I did that was I had a fair swath of changes throughout them all and I was very tired of making the same changes on many machines so a very long time ago I decided the authoritative version would be the one in my source tree and the preferred method for distributing the changes would be installs and upgrades.
All other configuration or data files (/etc/services, etc., as well as all *.conf of course) are considered to be owned by the system they live on and they are merged with new changes from the source tree (via installs and upgrades) with etcupdate if necessary.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<woods%planix.ca@localhost>