Re: postinstall wiped out my /etc/rc changes

["Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc." <woods%planix.ca@localhost>]

On 3-May-08, at 9:52 AM, Greg Troxel 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.

Like I said, anything that's a script or script fragment should be  
owned by the OS unless it has a name matching *.local.  Pretty much  
everything else is owned by the local host.

That way all executable code can be updated by an upgrade without any  
manual intervention unless it was supposed to be locally modifiable.   
Everything else should be updated by etcupdate, unless of course  
there's some transformation which can safely be performed by  
postinstall without losing any customizations.

The trick is knowing in advance where these .local hooks are needed  
and perhaps in some cases maintaining some semblance of a fixed API  
for them too (e.g. dhclient scripts where environment variables are  
expected, or rc scripts where environment and perhaps also available  
functions are expected).

--
                                        Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
                                        <woods%planix.ca@localhost>