[gentoo-dev] Policy regarding enablement of drop-in configuration files

[Mike Gilbert]

Hi all,

I have been bumping heads with Mike Frysinger (vapier) on the topic of
drop-in config files that are utilized by quite a few system services
on Gentoo. For reference, see bug 544150.

Mike claims that Gentoo has a policy of "not enabling anything by
default", and that this policy applies to both init scripts, and
drop-in configuration files.

I counter that we have no such policy. We don't generally enable init
scripts by default because that just makes logical sense. Mike F. is
trying to apply this same logic to drop-in configs, and that just
doesn't fit.

Regarding drop-in configuration files, there are many examples where
these are generally enabled by default, or it is left to the
maintainers discretion:

- udev rules are enabled by default
- crontab entries are left to the maintainer, but are generally
enabled by default
- tmpfiles.d entries are enabled by default
- logrotate entries are enabled by default
- binfmt.d entries are enabled by default

Further, the way many of these services is designed does not allow for
the drop-in configs to be easily disabled by default by the OS vendor.
However, in most cases, they may be disabled by the sysadmin by use of
an overriding drop-in config somewhere under /etc.

My questions to the community:

- Do we have a policy regarding enablement of drop-in config files?
- If so, what is it? Where is it documented?
- If not, do we need a policy and what should it be?
- Keep in mind that any policy needs to be technically feasible to implement.