On 12/12/22 13:27, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
On Mon, Dec 12, Lee Duncan wrote:
So you expect upstream packages we use in openSUSE to create a layered configuration file system, since systemd does it that way?
Many upstream packages do that already, we just never really enforced, that package maintainers adjust their packages. See e.g. dbus.
The way I see it, I'd have to submit changes upstream to do this (ignoring the hours of work it would take), then hope they accept them, and if they do then other distributions using the code would have to change as well. And all to support some transactional model layered on top of Linux?
Not because of transactional update or something similar, there are many more reasons. Just read the blog mentioned in this thread or the old discussion on factory about this some years ago.
I read the blog post. It still seems a lot of work for no change to the end user. Each time something moves like this, in a package, users have to learn the new location. And then distributions (like SUSE) need to jump through hoops to support both the old and the new location. For example, I moved the configuring file for open-iscsi from /etc/iscsid.conf to /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf about 10 years ago. And the symlink /etc/iscsid.conf I created to keep users from freaking out is still there. And now I'm moving database files from /etc/iscsi to /var/log/iscsi, and again I'm having to put in quite a few hours to package this correctly for both TW and SLES. (Oh yeah: and /sbin vs /usr/sbin.) So now let's also just quit using redesign our configuration system to support stacked config directories? I can see this in new packages, but in existing ones?
And about upstream: my team made very good experience with this. We upstreamed many of our changes, and only once a maintainer refused the idea at all. Else all changes are upstream. Only today we got support for /etc/shells (/etc/shells.d, /usr/*/shells.d/, ...) upstream in Linux-PAM and util-linux, shadow is only waiting for some documentation adjustements.
In this case I'm one of the two upstream maintainers for two of my packages that use /etc for configuration.