[Fedora-packaging] Re: Fontconfig rules installation guidelines change proposal

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mercredi 15 octobre 2008 à 15:10 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod a écrit :

conf.avail and conf.dyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

> Hi Nicolas,

Hi Behdad,

Thank you for reviewing it,

> I like the direction of it.
> 
> The idea of having separate conf.avail and conf.d is that sysadmins can
> symlink/unlink entries into conf.d to enable/disable configuration for their
> system.  This would only work if upgrading fontconfig/fonts rpms does not
> reinstate the unlinked symlink.  However, last time I checked this was not
> working correctly.  Can you check this first?

I didn't write it in the wiki, but as far as I understand rpm it is not
possible to tell it "if this file/symlink does not exist do not install
it". So this bit of conf.avail/conf.d design will never work on rpm
systems. And even if it worked, what you'd actually need would be "if
this file does not exist and was installed by a previous rpm" to handle
initial deployment. Which starts to be real hairy. (more generally
treating absence of an item as disabling this item is a broken computer
pattern IMHO.)

However (someone please check this) it's probably possible to disable an
entry permanently by creating a symlink with the same name pointing
somewhere else (how does fontconfig reacts to /dev/null symlinks or
symlinks pointing to empty files)? So having a repository of
pre-deployed config snippets is fine with me.

Also (and this bit is traced on the wiki) as I understand the
FHS /etc/.../conf.avail is a complete no-go and should be moved
to /usr/share/something if we want to be clean. And that
before /etc/.../conf.avail is duplicated in many packages.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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