[ On , August 11, 2000 at 20:41:48 (+0200), Johan Danielsson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: /etc/*.conf reorg (was Re: `rc.local.conf': bad nam )
>
> Luke Mewburn <lukem@cs.rmit.edu.au> writes:
> 
> > * change each of the *.conf files to something like:
> 
> I like the idea, but one problem is that we now have to start merging
> local changes made to rc.conf. One of the reasons for rc.local.conf
> was to make it possible to put all local changes into a file that
> NetBSD doesn't ship.

I don't think merging something that's going to to be, for all intents
and purposes, almost entirely static is going to be much of a problem....

I.e. the "vendor" changes will be to /etc/default/*.conf and the user
changes will be to /etc/*.conf with all user changes appearing below
the line that says: 	# Add local overrides below

That line, and the very few lines above it, will not likely ever have to
change so there's not going to be anything to merge.

In other words /etc/rc.conf will be the equivalent of /etc/rc.conf.local.

The real problem is the fact that it shouldn't ever be empty by default
and that it must contain a shell statement.  Of course those consumers
of *.conf files which don't use shell syntax can always be modified to
read their default configs from /etc/default/ and then look for
overrides in /etc/ (eg. inetd.conf, syslogd.conf, newsyslog.conf, etc.,
etc., etc.)  Of course shell scripts using /etc/*.conf files could also
be change to source /etc/default/*.conf and then only source /etc/*.conf
if it exists and is not empty.  Then you'd only have files directly in
/etc if they'd been locally modified and the merging issue would go away
completely.  This would be a more radical change though, and one that
would perhaps confuse a few more people for at least a short time....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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