bad practice: not reading the manpage

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 11:00:57AM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> /bin/ls is part of the coreutils package as a fixed, unchangeable
> component. "Fixed" with regard to sysadmin's actions. You're not
> supposed to mangle /bin/ls or similar parts of the package, you are
> supposed to let RPM deal with that.

And you're not supposed to run chkconfig --del either. (Just 'cause you
*can* doesn't mean you *should*.)


> The symlinks in /etc/rc*.d however, those are a different story. You are
> allowed to make changes. They're similar to config files.

Sure. Maybe /bin/ls is bad example, so let's pick another:

If I delete /etc/prelink.conf, I'd expect it to come back when I did an
upgrade.


> To let RPM overrule the sysadmin's decisions w.r.t. those symlinks is
> like letting RPM blindly overwrite config files during "rpm -U" and not
> save backups of the old files.

And, if I modify /etc/prelink.conf, I *do* get a backup. In fact, I get an
.rpmnew file. That's the proper behavior. Likewise, if I properly use
chkconfig off instead of deleting the configuration information completely,
my configuration is preserved.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 81 degrees Fahrenheit.