On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 10:58:36AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote: > Roger Price wrote: > > On Mon, 17 Aug 2026, Michel Verdier wrote: > > > > > What is your version ? Here I have fetchmail 6.4.39-1 > > > > rprice@titan ~ apt show fetchmail > > Package: fetchmail > > Version: 6.4.39-1 > > > > > And man fetchmail or fetchmailrc shows : > > > GENERAL OPERATION > > > Command-line options override ~/.fetchmailrc declarations. > > > > When I started to write the message, I had not yet understood that > > « Command-line options override ~/.fetchmailrc declarations » means that > > Debian > > 13 replaces ~/.fetchmailrc with /etc/fetchmailrc . > > > That's not quite it, either. > > The normal and expected course of configuration overrides: > > 1. If you call fetchmail with options, those take precedent for > this run. > > 2. if .fetchmailrc exists in the home of the user running it, > that is used. If not...
... not quite: this preference hierarchy happens /per option/, i.e. if some option is set in the command line, then this is the one, otherwise if it is set in ~/.fetchmailrc, use that, else... > 3. if /etc/fetchmailrc exists, that is used. ... I don't see any mention of /etc/fetchmailrc in Trixie's man page, nor in forky's (aka testing), so hmmm... > 4. if none of these things happen, whatever behavior is listed > as defaults for the command happens. ... and this is the last resort for each option. > This pattern repeats across many, many programs. Sometimes the > user's config file (step 2) might be expected to live in: > > > ~/.programname > ~/.programname/ (a directory) > ~/.config/programname/ > ~/.local/share/programname/ > > > Or something weirder. [...] It is true that this is a general pattern (and a very useful one, at that), but usually, "later" (or "higher") config files just override option-by-option. I guess that is what you meant, but your text reads as if the whole of ~/.config would override /etc/config and so on. One variation of your schema has one more level: /usr/share/app/config for the application's/distribution's defaults, /etc/app/config for the local sysadmin, ~/.app-config for the user (of course the names I gave above are just placeholders). Cheers -- t
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