Re: [gentoo-user] Things that can be improved

["Walter Dnes" <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 09:22:29PM +0200, Rafael Fern??ndez L??pez wrote

>   This is not flame war. I love Gentoo, and it is the distribution
> that fits me perfectly, but I've been wondering this last year what
> things can be improved in this wonderful distro.
> 
>   The first thing that I'd change is "etc-update" or "dispatch-conf".

  etc-update needs only one change to make it perfect for me, namely the
ability to protect changes to default parameters.  Here are 3 examples
from a recent update, where an automaton has no business touching
certain lines...

/etc/conf.d/bootmisc
-WIPE_TMP="yes"
+WIPE_TMP="no"

/etc/conf.d/local.start
 # This is a good place to load any misc programs
-# on startup ( use 1>&2 to hide output)
-modprobe snd-virmidi index=1
+# on startup (use &>/dev/null to hide output)
+

/etc/conf.d/rc
@@ -74,7 +89,12 @@
 # and restore it on startup.  This is useful if you have a lot of
 # custom device nodes that udev does not handle/know about.

-RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="yes"
+RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="no"
+

  When I say "yes" I mean "yes".  When I say "no" I mean "no".  And I
don't mean "just until the next update" either.  I have reasons for my
settings; please don't act like Windows and assume that you know better
than me.  And there is no excuse whatsoever for wiping out the custom
settings in /etc/conf.d/local.start

  Would it be possible to have some comment declaration like...

#etc-update-protect-begin
WIPE_TMP="yes"
#etc-update-protect-end

...to protect a block of lines against changes, while allowing other
lines to be changed?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
-- 
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