Steve Greenland wrote: > What Hamish was pointing out is that it's okay to use emacs or vi or > icepref to modify configuration files and even conffiles. The policy > proposal was in no way meant to imply that you can't write programs to > modify conffiles (either general or specific), just that they can't be > used in a way that hides what they are doing. This is probably obvious > to most people, which is why saying anything about it tends to be > confusing.
>From reading your proposal (and the original policy text) I got the impression that such tools would not be allowed. I'm also the maintainer of Linuxconf (which is obviously such a tool) and someone on debian-admintool once claimed that Linuxconf was violating policy because it changes conffiles of other packages. So I would like to see a section like this one from your other mail added to our proposal: > It's ok to have a special/specialized editor to modify a conffile, but > it should never be run by anything except a human, and it should be > obvious to that human that the conffile is being modified. > BTW, both this proposal (#40766) and the general clean-up proposal > (#40767) are currently stalled with only one official seconder (Joey > Hess). I second both proposals. -- Stefan Gybas