Hi, > My general rule of thinking about it is: > state is an opion within the program which can be changed and > should be remembered next time. > esp something which reasonably could change every time the program > is used (it is concievable I have a CD today...in a month I am FTP > upgrading) > > this is not something which is meant to be changed "by hand" > besides...
There are several packages that supply a <package>-config script to manipulate their config files because their config files are rather complex (e.g., sendmail). The config files are, however, located in /etc. > the main rational for /var is to allow other partitions to be mounted > read only... > if this were stored in /etc..../etc would HAVE to be mounted read-write > > (though I supose given the nature of deslect you could argue everything > excpet /home and /usr/local should be read-write...) Yes, when I change the access method or the list of selected packages I am almost certainly going to upgrade the system and therefore /etc and /usr have to be mounted r/w anyhow. My point is that the list of selected packages belongs to the *basic* configuration of a debian system and it should be stored on /etc. We have a whole bunch of different desktop debian machines and I want to be shure that I can restore the state of each machine after a disk crash. To rebuild a single system I need * the knowledge of the physical disk layout * a backup copy of /etc and /home * a debian archive * some information hidden in /var/lib/dpkg It would be fine and consistent, if I could omit the last point. Cheers, Thomas