Re: postinstall wiped out my /etc/rc changes

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

On 6-May-08, at 2:29 AM, David Holland wrote:
> At the risk of opening a can of worms, I'd argue that anything in /etc
> that is *not* meant to be administrator-modified should be moved out
> of /etc, to /libexec or /libdata or /usr/share or whatever.

Indeed.  However as you say that goes against long standing practice  
and expectations and that's more or less exactly why I chose to define  
things in terms of scripts vs. configuration files and make is so that  
any modifiable scripts were handled by use of a filename pattern such  
as "*.local".  I myself am too comfortable with the current locations  
of things and I didn't want to disrupt even just my own expectations.

> Doing this right would in some cases require being able to read the
> contents from two places (e.g. /libdata/services and /etc/services) or
> partitioning the contents of files and reworking the config formats
> (e.g., inetd.conf; the definitions of the standard services should be
> tucked away in /usr/share) or other hacking.

For configuration files which are essentially record based, as opposed  
to those which are really script fragments (even if the assumption is  
that only variable assignments will be made), and especially for  
record based files where search order is defined (or even just  
implied) to be linear, your suggestion should be easy to implement in  
a semi-transparent way.

On the other hand those are exactly the types of files which are very  
easy to manage with simple line-oriented tools, eg. in the way  
etcupdate works so I'm not sure it's worth adding a layer of potential  
confusion.

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