RE: 4.x to 5.x upgrade

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Thompson, Tim wrote:

A question. Given the choice between:

• Having a command tell you "there's a conflicting command already in /etc/rc, you should change it there as well (or just remove it)"

vs.

• Having the command automatically update /etc/rc with the change, if it contains a conflicting command.

Which do you think would be a better approach?

Automatic updating of /etc/rc would be IMHO a *bad* thing. We use RCS to keep revision history of changes that we make to our filers. If the command automatically updated the file, the admin would have to remember to run 'rcs -l rc', 'ci -u rc' straight away. If they forgot to, the next user to come along and make a change that required editing /etc/rc (say SNMP, which I can't see being stored persistently) would run 'co -l rc' and get the last checked in version of the file, wiping out the automatically registered changes.