2004-03-08 · in Ideas · 126 words

Currently GARstow just tells packages being installed to stick their config files in sysconfdir; this works fine for me, but it's not very convenient when upgrading or downgrading packages that make incompatible changes to their config file formats. An alternative would be to make packages install their config files in packageprefix/etc (while still being compiled with the right value of sysconfdir), and merge changes at stow time: calculate a diff between the old provided config files and those currently in sysconfdir, then try applying it to the new provided config files, and complain if it fails. This would require, among other things, knowing what the old installed version was before stowing. It might also be nice in the future to enforce that packages should use sysconfdir/GARNAME.