On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 5:31 AM Thorsten Kukuk <kukuk@suse.de> wrote:
Hi,
Currently we have two directories with similar usage:
- /etc/default, seems to come from Debian, mainly used by upstream projects on openSUSE - /etc/sysconfig, mainly based on Red Hat, mainly used for start scripts written by us. I will ignore the subdirectories here.
Both have files with in a KEY=VALUE format which can be sources by a shell.
/etc/default is controlled by RPM, so changes in the config files lead to *.rpmsave or *.rpmnew files.
/etc/sysconfig is controlled by fillup. Adding new variables is easy, changing defaults or removing variables is next to impossible in most cases.
Why do I write this? No, I don't want to get rid of /etc/sysconfig, but bring up an idea how to solve quite some of the problems with updating sysconfig files. Many bug reports about sysconfig files get closed as "Wontfix", since changing defaults is really difficult, as we don't want to overwrite user made changes, and adjusting comments is next to impossible. As result, an user may have many sysconfig files with outdated comments and content after a longer time after installation. This can be very irritating or lead to not working configurations and frustrations as following this steps does not lead to success. Hey, we still have comments which tells the user that he has now to run SuSEconfig because of this!
To run and manage our openSUSE containers via podman and systemd, we started with as example for the bind container:
/etc/sysconfig/container-bind
container-bind.service, which did contain: EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/container-bind
and we run immeaditly into problems as there were typos in it which we couldn't fix in an easy way on already installed systems.
But we have now /usr/etc and /usr/etc/default :)
So /usr/etc/default/container-bind contains now the system default (fillup doesn't make sense here, as this file is RPM controlled and should not be changed by an user), and the user can override single variables by creating a file /etc/default/container-bind with just this modified variables.
The container-bind.service looks now like: EnvironmentFile=/usr/etc/default/container-bind EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/container-bind
All update problems solved without the need to find out, if a variable is modified by an user or not.
This is not a proposal to change now all sysconfig files, but I think many packages could benefit from such a change, especially if they are really old and the sysconfig template gets often changed. The packaging change is trivial: install the sysconfig template in /usr/etc/default/, adjust your docu and remove the fillup call. And you need to think about, if you want to rename the old sysconfig file to *.rpmsave or move it to /etc/default.
Is this something we should propose as "best practise", or are there reasons not to do so we haven't found yet?
Actually, a question to ask is: why do we need fillup? In Fedora, we don't use fillup at all for /etc/sysconfig files either, and people don't generally miss it. In fact, because we don't have it there, there's been a lot more effort to make things work without environment files or with layered configuration, because the fillup system doesn't exist as a crutch to avoid it. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org