The problem Diana, is if we provide this then we have to
dodge it on upgrades.

In My Not So Humble Opinion, we should be ENCOURAGING people to make
customizations by overriding in rc.conf.local instead of changing in
rc.conf - The biggest attraction to me for this is that there is *NO*
/etc/rc.conf.local in the etc sets. Similarly, IMO we should leave
rc.local alone because this makes upgrades a hell of a lot easier.
If we provide a sample inthe /etc set, and will overwrite it if you
extract /etc.

This is why I actually think we should NOT provide rc.local. and
other "exmaple" files that do nothing by default. So personally, I'm
in the rc.conf.local loving crowd, and because of that, I think we
shouldn't ship rc.local If we want to provide examples, put them in
man pages or /usr/share, and then document the hell (root.mail, faq's.
etc. etc.) about how to customize an openbsd box whilst touching a
minimum of files which you will have to merge by hand on every
upgrade.

Heck, I'd actually be much happier with a /etc/whatever.35
as an example for /etc/whatever (such as /etc/rc.local, pf.conf, etc.
etc.) or an /etc/examples/whatever with a little question at the end
of every install defaulting to yes that copied them into place. A
thorough and sensible job of that coupled with advising
people to use rc.conf.local and rc.local correctly would go a long
way toward making it much easier for people to run upgrades.


-Bob


* Grumpy <grumpy@grumble-bubble.org> [2004-06-04 11:21]:
> > the situation is basically the same for rc.conf.local and rc.local.
> > when you use those consistently, you can treat rc and rc.conf like
> > binaries on upgrades and simply overwrite them, which is good.
> > thus we either should not provide these files at all by default, or
> > no-op templates, where everything is commented out etc.
>
> Bah.
>
> The real truth here is that if you provide a default rc.conf.local, it
> will be necessary to let it source an hypothetical rc.conf.local.local
> file, so that people can be sure that rc.conf.local can be upgraded
> safely.
>
> Grumpy
>

--
Bob Beck Computing and Network Services
beck@bofh.ucs.ualberta.ca University of Alberta
True Evil hides its real intentions in its street address.