Re: [PATCH] install config files

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

This seems vaguely reasonable to me in the abstract.  But I wonder if it's
actually what anybody wants.  People doing package-system builds of glibc
are already handling the /etc files some way or other.  I would kind of
expect that they put files like nsswitch.conf into different packages
having to do with system configuration, rather than the glibc packages.  

For anybody doing a 'make install' directly to be used (not that anybody
really does that), clobbering existing /etc files is not so nice.

It seems doubtful anybody actually uses the default nsswitch.conf we have
in the libc sources.  I think every system has tools that write
nsswitch.conf from scratch based on the system configuration details.

nscd.conf probably makes a bit more sense, since it is rather less likely
to vary with every single local installation.

The only precedent we have for installing /etc files is /etc/rpc.  That
should probably be deprecated or removed from our install since all of
sunrpc is now deprecated.  At least some distributions are using a
different file there, too.

So I'm not inclined to put this in until we hear from a quorum of
distribution maintainers.  You represent Gentoo, and apparently you want
it.  Andreas S. represents Fedora, and I can see from fedora/master
branch's fedora/glibc.spec.in that it does install these files from the
sources.  Andreas J. (presumably) represents SuSE--what say you?  Since the
Debian/Ubuntu people use a fork and don't participate directly here, I
guess we won't hear from them.


Thanks,
Roland