severity 533287 wishlist thanks Sune Vuorela <report...@pusling.com> writes:
> There has recently on #debian-devel been a few discussions about > wether it was allowed to edit other packages configuration files (not > 'conffiles') in maintainer scripts. > > My interpretation of policy is that you are only allowed to edit other > packages configure files thru a specific provided interface > (e.g. update-inetd), and if a package don't offer such a interface, > you aren't allowed. > > Some people seems to claim that you are allowed to do > sed/cat/echo/perl magic on other packages configuration files in > maintainerscripts if you really need it and there is no provided > interface. > > I would like to get the wording clarified so that it is either fully > permitted or, in my preference, clearly not allowed. What isn't clear about Policy right now? If it is desirable for two or more related packages to share a configuration file and for all of the related packages to be able to modify that configuration file, then the following should be done: * One of the related packages (the "owning" package) will manage the configuration file with maintainer scripts as described in the previous section. * The owning package should also provide a program that the other packages may use to modify the configuration file. * The related packages must use the provided program to make any desired modifications to the configuration file. They should either depend on the core package to guarantee that the configuration modifier program is available or accept gracefully that they cannot modify the configuration file if it is not. (This is in addition to the fact that the configuration file may not even be present in the latter scenario.) I'm not seeing how that could be made less ambiguous. It seems to me that your position is clearly correct and Policy spells that out rather explicitly. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org