Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion
Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no> writes:
> ]] Russ Allbery
>> I think the upstart approach is better, but I think the drawbacks of
>> the systemd approach could be mostly overcome with some fairly simple
>> Debian tools.
> We were initially considering using ucf and checking if the file in /etc
> had changed (before we had per-line overrides and such), but with the
> more complex overrides now available, I think systemd-delta is a better
> solution. I guess we could integrate that into the packaging somehow
> and present a useful UI if you've overridden a line that changes.
Right, several people have pointed me at systemd-delta, but your last
sentence was the tool that I was driving at. systemd-delta tells you
whether you're currently overriding something, which is a useful building
block, but which doesn't restore conffile upgrade handling. What's needed
to keep existing Debian behavior is a tool that tells you whether the
maintainer and the local system administrator have changed the
configuration in conflicting ways so that something is now being
overridden that was not being overridden before.
In other words, systemd-delta does a two-way diff, but what's needed here
is a three-way diff plus integration into the packaging system so that, as
with conffile changes now, the upgrade (by default) stops and prompts the
local systems administrator with the orthogonal differences and lets them
choose how to handle the situation.
I don't think this would be particularly difficult to implement on top of
systemd-delta, although the details may be tricky to get right and may
require a few iterations.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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