Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek) [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek)

Posted Jan 25, 2007 20:57 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek) by hazelsct
Parent article: Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek)

Furthermore, please describe how leaving old configuration files across an upgrade -- which might change the configuration file formats -- is better than having a tool like debconf automatically fill in the values you selected when you first installed the package.

Debconf does that? Ouch. That's as bad as SUSE.

To answer your question: In many cases, the changes in the configuration files are just changes to comments (I really wonder why the update script bothers me with this at all). In any case, if I changed the file, then the version created by debconf was wrong, and the next version created by debconf will probably be wrong, too. So leaving the old configuration files is better in that the chance is better that the result just works.

There's an inherent tradeoff between "annoyingly chatty" and "defaults that break". Only Debconf allows you to select what you want in this range, and modify options on a package-by-package basis e.g. "dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low xserver-xorg".

Now there is a good example. So I install Etch, and without asking a question, the xorg.conf file is almost correct (the remaining bug was that it said "ati" where it should say "radeon", and actually "ati" is supposed to work, too). The next thing I do is to apt-get upgrade, and all of a sudden I get asked a whole bunch of questions, all of them irrelevant (e.g., X is nowadays better at knowing the monitor's capabilities than most users), but it does not give me the choice to select the "radeon" driver. And it did not give me the choice to keep the old config file.