Idea for a possible patch to the dpkg/apt system

[Matt Palmer]

On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 08:31:10PM +0100, Chris Neary wrote:
> So I had a thought: What if in future, dist-upgrading the system doesn't ask
> you if you want to replace a config file, just leaves them there as
> $FILE.dpkg-new, and upon restarting the system, it asks you if you want to
> replace your config files, one-by-one, in a batch.

Like if you, say, set DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive before running apt-get,
and then ran a small shell script to find all files ending in dpkg-new and
ask the appropriate questions?

> I considered thinking this would be good as a pre-configuration thing, but
> that's probably not really feasable. You'd (I'm guessing) have to cycle
> through the dist-upgrade process in a sort of simulation mode to detect what
> config files will want to be replacing old ones.

Probably.

> What do people here think? Are Ubuntu allowed to tweak such a major element
> of the Debian distribution?

Ubuntu can change whatever it likes -- that's the glory of Free Software. 
Whether they end up doing so is a whole other issue.

> Would it cause problems with hooking back up to Debian? Am I being stupid
> in thinking that poorly designed operating systems made in Redmond are the
> only excuse for this symptom of irritatingware? Really. Just load default
> settings and let me change them in the post-install if I need to.

I take it that you've never managed a bunch of systems in far-flung places
that you can't easily get to if they break?  What if I've tweaked SSH so
your default settings no longer allow me to login?  Ooops.

Not to mention the fact that, if you've got a pile of non-default settings,
putting them all back in again is the height of irritation.

> And if I have settings stored already, that probably means I want to keep
> them. (But leave me the new file just in case there's a new option to look
> at, or the entire format of the config file has changed [see also: the
> Music Player Daemon, the svn version of which did this recently]).

Ubuntu can already do this for you, as previously mentioned.

- Matt

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