[arch-dev-public] [ANNOUNCE] initscripts-2012.07.3

[Evangelos Foutras]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 2:52 AM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
> [..]
> * All variables in rc.conf can now be left unset and will default to
> something sensible

I find removing most of the variables to be confusing and would
suggest that [1] and [2] get reverted.

The commit log for [1] lists the following as the main reasoning
behind this change:

"Keeping everything in the manpage means we don't have to deal with
.pacnew files when updating minor detals (such as default options)."

My counterargument is the nonexistence, in the previous rc.conf, of
default options that would need to be changed in a way that is
transparent to the user.

Moreover, stuff like TIMEZONE, LOCALE and MODULES should be included
in rc.conf; nobody really wants to run their system with the default
LOCALE=C, and quite a few people will want to load extra modules (in
my case vboxnetflt), without messing around with other files
(/etc/locale.conf) or adding variables back into rc.conf,
respectively.

In conclusion, a) the existing rc.conf is already stripped down to the
essential system configuration options, b) I like having a default
structure of these options in rc.conf instead of adding them back in
at random places (in rc.conf), c) if we want to shift the task of
configuring the hostname/locale/keymap/etc to external files, it might
be preferable to remove them completely from rc.conf instead of having
multiple points of truth.

(The above is my view on this change after spending 10 minutes trying
to figure out how I can load modules through /etc/modprobe.d, after I
noticed that MODULES was removed from rc.conf. In my defense, I
thought it could be similar to the time MOD_BLACKLIST was dropped. :p)

[1] https://projects.archlinux.org/initscripts.git/commit/?id=5b0626
[2] https://projects.archlinux.org/initscripts.git/commit/?id=70810a