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Re: [PATCH] install config files


On Monday, September 19, 2011 14:45:53 Roland McGrath wrote:
> 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.

i'm not an expert at deb/rpm packaging, but it seems to me that Debian (and 
friends) and Fedora (and friends) both install the files from glibc's source 
tree, and do so in the main glibc pkg.

$ rpm -qf /etc/nsswitch.conf /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 
glibc-2.14.90-4.x86_64
glibc-2.14.90-4.x86_64

$ dpkg-query -S /etc/gai.conf /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 
libc6: /etc/gai.conf
libc6: /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

Gentoo certainly does it in the main pkg

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

while true, i'm not sure this is something we should worry about.  after all, 
the `make install` step is not atomic, so while make is updating your 
libraries in /lib/, there is quite a long period there where not all the glibc 
libs are from the same version.

> 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.

hmm, i thought we were using the default one in Gentoo, but it seems that even 
we don't.  but our install just blows away whatever is already there, so even 
having a sample is fine.

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

Gentoo uses the stock nscd.conf for sure

> 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.

Gentoo also uses the stock file.  in terms of not installing it, wouldn't that 
break old apps that are linked against an older glibc and thus query this db ?

> So I'm not inclined to put this in until we hear from a quorum of
> distribution maintainers.

fair enough

> Since the Debian/Ubuntu people use a fork and don't participate directly
> here, I guess we won't hear from them.

maybe we can get Aurelien to pipe up.  he's submitted some good work in the 
past.
-mike

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