website/bugs/postinst-clobbers-gpg.conf-settings.mdwn



[[meta title="debian packaging postinst script clobbers gpg.conf settings in /var/lib/monkeysphere" ]]
Do we want to allow the system administrator to make adjustments to
the gpg.conf config files found in /var/lib/monkeysphere?  At the
moment, there are two such files:

/var/lib/monkeysphere/gnupg-authentication/gpg.conf
/var/lib/monkeysphere/gnupg-host/gpg.conf

In the debian postinst scripts (debian/monkeysphere.postinst), the
contents of those files are overwritten on every upgrade/reinstall,
effectively clobbering any changes made by the local admin.
Maybe we do want to do this clobbering, though.  Stuff in /var is
generally not expected to be modified by hand.  I see two possible
resolutions to this:


when we clobber those files, include a comment along the lines of:
do not make changes to this file!  It is overwritten on each upgrade!


Avoid clobbering the files, and treat them as config files.


the latter approach suggests that they should be more properly stored
in /etc/, though.  This would give us all the conf-file tracking
apparatus, which is nice.  If we do want to do that, I guess we'd
symlink to them from the monkeysphere-specific $GNUPGHOMEs in
/var/lib/monkeysphere, since gpg does not seem to allow for
overriding the location of the gpg.conf independent of $GNUPGHOME.