[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#648433: Handling of non-conffiles

[Roger Leigh]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 09:44:11PM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Roger Leigh]
> > While the bug was originally filed as only wishlist, this does solve
> > a rather more important issue: any change to the defaults would
> > never take effect on upgrade; it would require a fresh install,
> > because it's only set once on initial install.
> 
> Note that this behaviour of not changing behaviour of the boot
> settings on upgrades were by design, not by accident.  Existing
> settings were not intended to change after the system were installed.

Does this apply to all values, or just a subset?  I'm wondering if
this specifically applies only to UTC, this might be moved to e.g.
/etc/default/hwclock which would perhaps permit rcS to become a
conffile if the other values could be treated normally.

> > Another alternative would be to make /etc/default/rcS a conffile.
> > The only niggle is that this file is modified by the installer,
> > which is not ideal.  However, this would make the use of ucf
> > redundant, if we can find a way to make this possible.
> 
> Actually, I believe you are trying to solve the wrong problem with
> both the ucf approach and your idea of turning /etc/default/rcS into a
> conffile.
> 
> If changes to the default setup should affect existing installations
> after upgrades, drop /etc/default/rcS and use code like this instead
> of only loading /etc/default/rcS:
> 
>   . /lib/init/default-rcS
>   if [ -e /etc/default/rcS ] ; then . /etc/default/rcS ; fi
> 
> This one the defaults get from a file not considered system
> configuration, and all (and only) local overrides are fetched from
> /etc/default/rcS.

We already do this in vars.sh AFAICT.  Though we could move the
hard-coded values out into /lib/init/default-rcS.


Regards,
Roger

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