[pacman-dev] /etc/fstab rewritten by pacman!

[Pierre Schmitz]

Am Dienstag, 10. April 2007 16:50:00 schrieb Roman Kyrylych:
> Few hours ago I did an update on my server via ssh.
> First I updated pacman from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1, then did -Su.
> One of packages was filesystem-0.8-2.
> I don't have etc/fstab in NoUpgrade since 2.9.8.
> Then some idiot rebooted server before I checked .pacnew files etc.
> One of my coworker called my by cellphone (I also noticed PuTTY became
> inactive).
> When I get to my second job (where server is located) - I saw that
> /etc/fstab is rewritten with package's default, though pacman also
> created fstab.pacnew.
> Any ideas why did this happen?

Well, it`s not the first time that this happens. In most cases this is the 
fault of the package and not pacman itself. But anyway: pacman should never 
overwrite anything within /etc. 

We should replace the backup=... tag in the PKGBUILD with an option like 
overwrite=... which explicitly lists every file that has to be overwritten. 
In every other case pacman has to ask the user if a file in /etc should be 
overwritten. Of cause we have to check if there is a difference between the 
current and new file.

As a workaround I have setup a cron job which backs up my /etc directory every 
day.