On 12/8/23 10:25, Stephen Gallagher wrote: > On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 9:58 AM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek > <zbyszek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> There is a long-term goal of moving packaged files out of /etc, so that >> only actual local configuration remains in /etc. This has some advantages: >> >> - Local configuration, i.e. the result of local administrative actions, >> is nicely split from static configuration that is part of package payload. >> 'find /etc' will show what is special to this local system, while >> 'find /usr' lists stuff that is part of packages and the same between >> systems. >> - We can support "factory reset" at the system level, i.e. do 'rm -rf /etc' >> to return everything to distro defaults. We're not there _yet_, but it >> works with a surprisingly large subset of packages. >> - We can support "factory reset" at a package level, by removing all the >> configuration and state of an individual package, without reinstalling it >> (possibly combined with some tmpfiles.d config to recreate things >> automatically.) >> - It becomes easier to build systems which are delivered as a stand-alone >> /usr-partition. This could be ostree-style systems, or image-based systems >> with the /usr-partition read-only and protected by dm-verity. We're not >> there _yet_, but many people are experimenting with this. >> >> When one looks in /etc, many of the files there are not "configuration". >> For example, /etc/services is a list of port:service mappings, and people >> maybe used to edit that twenty years ago, but now it's just a static file >> that just as well may be somewhere under /usr/lib/. The same is also >> true for /etc/bash_completion.d/ — people do not edit completion scripts. >> Most of those have been moved to /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/, >> but there's still a dozen or so in /etc. >> > > One thing that is becoming much more common is for us to ship such > static files in /usr/lib and include a default symlink in /etc for > those packages whose presence there is effectively API (for example > /etc/os-release is a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release, similarly > /etc/resolv.conf). I think this is a very good approach and one that > we should probably look at formalizing in the packaging guidelines. I'd rather see defaults under somewhere in /usr/share rather than /usr/lib. > That being said, there are files like /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/pam.d/* > and /etc/fstab which are both API *and* sometimes see manual updates. > These are some of the cases that are going to make getting to an empty > /etc very hard to finish off. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we > can take care of in the meantime, but getting the last 1% of packages > done is going to take a lot of inter-distro conversations. We could just have an /etc tree like we see now but in /usr/share/etc (or /usr/etc, but then I get IRIX nightmares) and your local overrides exist in /etc. Things like fstab will probably just have to always be host-dependent so they will always exist in /etc. For this to be really clean and nice, everything that drops a file in /etc needs to handle the "read in the default; then read in the optional local overrides" model. I know a lot of stuff already does this, but some things don't. It would be a nice goal to aim for and maybe we can submit patches to upstream projects where the functionality is missing. -- David Cantrell <dcantrell@xxxxxxxxxx> Red Hat, Inc. | Boston, MA | EST5EDT -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
