On Mon, 18.07.11 23:26, Miloslav Trmač (mitr@xxxxxxxx) wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 10:57 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'm sympathetic to Lennart's arguments, but really this should be > > discussed and decided in the context of a real, open forum, drawing > > interested people from all of the Linux distros (possibly BSD etc > > too). Perhaps LSB? > > /etc/sysconfig is not a file format standard. > /etc/sysconfig is not a place where configuration files of the same > format or purpose are stored. > /etc/sysconfig is not a place used to store configuration shared by > independent software packages. > /etc/sysconfig is not a software package. > > I can't see a reason to discuss /etc/sysconfig as a single unit, nor > to argue for removal of /etc/sysconfig a single unit, nor to try to > form a definite consensus about /etc/sysconfig. Oh, it definitely can be discussed as single unit. Check the Fedora packaging guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:SysVInitScript "Although init files live in /etc, they are scripts to be executed, not configured. Any configuration should be made available through /etc/sysconfig/<service> rather than in the init script itself. A valid exception to this rule would be existing packages where configuration is still done via the init file. In this case, the init file could be marked as %config following the rules from the Configuration files section to preserve a users configuration upon upgrade, hopefully so that the user can migrate said configuration to a new /etc/sysconfig/<service> config file." Now, this is very terse, and leaves the file format of this file undefined, but given that sysv init scripts are shell scripts, and given the usual contents of the dir I think it is reasonably safe to assume that these files are generally shell fragments. Of course, this is not the only use of /etc/sysconfig right now. There's a lot of other stuff in it, but I would still say that the primary use of the dir and most files placed in it have been placed there following the rules of the guidelines. (If that was not the case we had a major problem with namespacing issues.) > /etc/sysconfig is a conventional place where various > distribution-specific software stores its configuration. > > Note the two primary attributes: > > * _various_ software: Each file needs to be discussed separately, in > the context of the software that uses it. > /etc/sysconfig/{crond,iptables,nspluginwrapper} have nothing in > common, and need to be considered separately together with the > software that uses these files. Nah, not true. The packaging guidelines say explicitly what you should place in that directory. When we discuss getting rid of the dir we are also talking about updating the guidelines. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
