On 8/19/20 2:48 PM, Giancarlo Razzolini via arch-general wrote:
Em agosto 19, 2020 16:37 Yaro Kasear escreveu:
I've always questioned the wisdom of dropping a .pacnew just when the file is different from the default. There's really no reason for it considering any changes you made were deliberate and presumably thought out. The end result is pacman cluttering /etc with a default configuration file whose only reason for existing is to, if it's used, clear settings. Why?
The .pacnew is there to indicate that something new exists, or that you changed something. Most of the time you can remove .pacnew files, but not always. Also, it's only "cluttering" /etc (and /boot, btw), if you don't handle them.
What pacman SHOULD do is compare /etc files between package versions and see if there's a change BETWEEN DEFAULTS. *Then* there's an actual reason to need a new default config file for the user to examine because then there's an actual indicator some meaningful change in default configuration or how the package handles configs happened.
That's way beyond the scope of a package manager, and also, there's no way to tell what "DEFAULTS" (why caps?) should be. Caps for emphasis is all.
All most pacnew files wind up doing is sitting there for thirty seconds before being deleted without anyone even opening them because they're literally just what the file was before the user ALREADY changed it before... because it's utterly useless to get a default config file when you've intentionally changed it and there's nothing in the new version of the package that calls for an examination of the defaults.
I don't know why you said that .pacnew sits for thirty seconds before being deleted. Are you using a hook that does this? Because nothing handles them automatically, that's the user's job. There are tools to aid in doing that, but in the end the user should know what to apply, and what to discard. I wasn't being literal about thirty seconds. Exaggerating.
Regards, Giancarlo Razzolini
Yaro