Bug#745876: Please create /etc/machine-id if it does not exist

[Martin Pitt]

Hey Santiago,

Santiago Vila [2014-04-28 17:51 +0200]:
> For now, /etc/machine-id is a configuration (or state) file for the
> systemd package. Documentation about machine-id even says that
> removing the file on reboots is mostly harmless (you could have a
> different machine-id every time the machine boots and nothing bad
> would happen).
> 
> So, my recommendation (if you don't just ignore piuparts report)
> is that you actually remove it at purge.

Santiago Vila [2014-04-29 10:55 +0200]:
> If the only solution is not to remove machine-id, then piuparts is
> wrong and keeping machine-id in the system should be allowed.

This seems reasonable to to me for the time being, while systemd isn't
mandatory. Thus not creating it in base-files would mean that programs
cannot rely on /etc/machine-id and that we need a workaround for
running systemd's tests during build, but we have that already.

I think piuparts should be adjusted either way, and add machine-id to
the list of "unowned system-wide config files" like hostname or
default/locale.

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)