Re: Potato fresh install

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Paul Slootman wrote:

> Also, when upgrading mime-support, it always offers to replace the
> conffile /etc/mailcap, which is NEVER a smart thing to do.  Maybe
> /etc/mailcap should be one of the base files, and not part of
> mime-support?

This is Bug #34294, which I reported more than a year ago and it has not
been fixed yet.

Glad to know I'm not the only one to think this is a bug. I have tried to
convince the maintainer (Brian White) several times about the need to
change this, without much success. He says "/etc/mailcap almost never
changes" and he does not see the need to modify the way /etc/mailcap is
handled.

If this is not a bug in mime-support, then lots of packages would be
violating policy because they modify /etc/printcap ("a configuration file
of another package") every time they register their MIME viewers...

Time to make a policy proposal? It would be something like:
"Do not ever use the conffile mechanism to initialize a database".

Thanks.

-- 
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