[Openal-devel] Some patches used in Debian openal-soft package

[Andres Mejia]

On Sunday 17 May 2009 15:35:11 Chris Robinson wrote:
> On Sunday 17 May 2009 10:17:41 am Andres Mejia wrote:
> > Something I see done in such a case is to either have everything
> > commented out or set the options to the default that would be used by a
> > program anyway. I see the configuration file is already written with the
> > latter approach in mind. The configuration file is then installed in the
> > location the program would read for system wide settings, under /etc/*.
> > It's then up to the user to modify the configuration file.
>
> That can be done, I guess. My only concern would be package managers that
> don't like their installed files to be externally modified.. Gentoo, for
> example, will not remove a file when uninstalling if the md5sum or some
> other property doesn't match what it was installed with. Subsequently,
> trying to install a package when the file exists may cause a complaint that
> existing files will be overwritten.

I think most distros have this similar behavior. I know in Debian, configurations 
are only removed if you explicitly set to purge the package, as opposed to just 
removing. Also, on package upgrades, the configuration file is not overwritten if 
it detects that the user edited the configuration file.

Also, I don't know about other distros, but for Debian packaging, files get 
installed in a temporary directory, under <top_src_dir>/debian/tmp, and then 
from here all the files are moved from here to the corresponding package. Nothing 
is ever packaged up from the actual system directories. I would be surprised if 
something similar is not done for creating some other distro packages. In this 
case, there's never worry that configuration files that have been edited are 
overwritten.

With the patch, a user has to set that they want the configuration file installed. 
So even for users that build directly from source, they won't be overwriting 
their configuration files unless they explicitly set to install them.

-- 
Regards,
Andres