On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 9:58 AM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbys...@in.waw.pl> wrote: > > Hi, > > There is a long-term goal of moving packaged files out of /etc, so that > only actual local configuration remains in /etc. This has some advantages: > > - Local configuration, i.e. the result of local administrative actions, > is nicely split from static configuration that is part of package payload. > 'find /etc' will show what is special to this local system, while > 'find /usr' lists stuff that is part of packages and the same between > systems. > - We can support "factory reset" at the system level, i.e. do 'rm -rf /etc' > to return everything to distro defaults. We're not there _yet_, but it > works with a surprisingly large subset of packages. > - We can support "factory reset" at a package level, by removing all the > configuration and state of an individual package, without reinstalling it > (possibly combined with some tmpfiles.d config to recreate things > automatically.) > - It becomes easier to build systems which are delivered as a stand-alone > /usr-partition. This could be ostree-style systems, or image-based systems > with the /usr-partition read-only and protected by dm-verity. We're not > there _yet_, but many people are experimenting with this. > > When one looks in /etc, many of the files there are not "configuration". > For example, /etc/services is a list of port:service mappings, and people > maybe used to edit that twenty years ago, but now it's just a static file > that just as well may be somewhere under /usr/lib/. The same is also > true for /etc/bash_completion.d/ — people do not edit completion scripts. > Most of those have been moved to /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/, > but there's still a dozen or so in /etc. >
One thing that is becoming much more common is for us to ship such static files in /usr/lib and include a default symlink in /etc for those packages whose presence there is effectively API (for example /etc/os-release is a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release, similarly /etc/resolv.conf). I think this is a very good approach and one that we should probably look at formalizing in the packaging guidelines. That being said, there are files like /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/pam.d/* and /etc/fstab which are both API *and* sometimes see manual updates. These are some of the cases that are going to make getting to an empty /etc very hard to finish off. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we can take care of in the meantime, but getting the last 1% of packages done is going to take a lot of inter-distro conversations. -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
