Bug#681635: devscripts.conf handling

[James McCoy]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 12:03:49AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> devscripts.conf handling seems to be a bit weird to me...

Indeed.

> AFAICS, the file is not installed on new installations, right?

It actually is.  The code snippet you're referring to is

  if dpkg --compare-versions "$2" lt 2.6.90 && [ ! -f /etc/devscripts.conf ]
  then
    cp /usr/share/devscripts/conf.default /etc/devscripts.conf

On a new installation $2 is empty, so the dpkg call succeeds, the check
for a missing devscripts.conf succeeds, and the copy takes place.

> And on installations where it already exists, it's manually extended by
> added config file snippets.

Yes, and I notice that the code which does that is missing various
snippets for config variables that were added since 2.11.70.

> Can't this be managed as configfile, or via ucf or so? Or is the intended way
> now to remove it, if nothing was changed from the defaults.

It's been like that for the entirety of history in git.  The two reasons
that come to mind would be

- Lack of good tooling for handling conffile changes when
  devscripts.conf was introduced
- devscripts.conf contains the version of devscripts that generated it

The latter aspect means that the user would be prompted about changes on
every upgrade.  However, I think at least passable tooling existed in
2002 when devscripts.conf was introduced, so I'm not really sure why
this approach was chosen.

I'd be fine with changing how this is handled, but that needs some
investigation on how to handle that transition.

Cheers,
-- 
James
GPG Key: 4096R/331BA3DB 2011-12-05 James McCoy <jamessan at debian.org>
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