[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Re: [Pkg-sysvinit-commits] r406 - sysvinit/trunk/debian/initscripts/etc/default

[Thomas Hood]

Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> Every time you change a conffile, you create upgrade upgrade issues
> for the people with the package installed.  We should try to avoid
> this.


Yes, well that was the reason for doing so much work in the previous
release.  We don't want to keep making little changes in dribs and
drabs.


> And every time you change a variable name, the people with the old
> name need to update to the new name, and this make upgrades even more
> painful.  We should work even harder to avoid this.


TMPFS_SIZE is still supported.  The problem is that the name is ambiguous:
there are already two tmpfs's and we are adding a third.  So I added new
variables RUN_SIZE and SHM_SIZE which default to TMPFS_SIZE.


> I suggest we try to keep the conffiles in /etc/defaults/ as static as
> possible, and never change variable names in them.


One approach is to make them non-conffiles and update them in the postinst:

    1. Read in /etc/default/tmpfs
    2. Write out /etc/default/tmpfs starting with template
       /usr/share/initscripts/default.tmpfs and replacing variables
       with the values read in step 1


> We should also try
> to avoid editing them unless the changes is very important.  I've been
> thinking about converting the init.d scripts to use multilevel
> configuration, so we could store our defaults somewhere else, and only
> fetch overrides from /etc/defaults/, to reduce the upgrade problems.
> But I have not found time for it yet. :/

I am not sure what you have in mind.  Can you explain further?
-- 
Thomas