On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Dan Stromberg wrote:
We may not not need dual file ownerships. In fact, I believe we don't.
We want to automate our install as much as possible, and some here believe that rpm is the right way to automate it, including rpm file dual ownership.
For example, we want to throw a getty on ttyS0 - for that we need to change /etc/inittab. The approach so far has been to replace /etc/inittab. I'm now trying to gently pitch changing it from a post and postun.
and in the case of /etc/inittab it will be the best way to modify it (instead of just plainly replacing the file). This file is marked as %config(noreplace) in the package owning it (in this case aaa_base) so you are indeed pretty safe from your changes being overwritten by a possible aaa_base update. Putting this the other way around: if the need arises to frequently touch some system-owned files, it may make sense to either get the distribution to support your local changes, maybe even controlled by some sysconfig variable or similar or get the distribution to mark that file as %config(noreplace) in the owning package. But both of these approaches have their issues and can not always be taken. For example if a config file in a package changes from time to time (because of upstream), a %config(noreplace) would prevent updating users from getting the new configuration, which may even be needed for proper operation of a certain given package ... -- with kind regards (mit freundlichem Grinsen), Ruediger Oertel (ro@novell.com,ro@suse.de,bugfinder@t-online.de) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Linux Fatou 2.6.24-rc6-git7-2-default #1 SMP 2008/01/01 21:14:48 UTC x86_64 Key fingerprint = 17DC 6553 86A7 384B 53C5 CA5C 3CE4 F2E7 23F2 B417 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)