Re: [gentoo-user] preventing keyboard layout files from being overritten during system upgrades

[Stroller]

> On Tue, 8 December 2015, at 12:29 a.m., Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> It seems just a tad exotic to me, as I haven't used or needed it in over 10 years.
>
> You never run etc-update or dispatch-conf?  If you do, you're using
> it.  You're just using its default configuration and not adding
> directories to it.

That's like telling your grandma, "you don't know what DNS is? this is internet 101 - you use DNS all the time".

I have not needed to add directories to CONFIG_PROTECT, or alter it in any way, in over 10 years of using Gentoo.


>> Am I not correct in thinking that a /usr/local/whatever directory would work as I described previously? [1]
>
> Only if you patch the program in question to read the file there.

Excuse me. I thought this was a standard thing, just as I have scripts in /usr/local/bin/ and a local Portage tree in /usr/local/portage/, I would have assumed that an application like X11 that looks in /usr/share/X11/ for its configuration files would then look in /usr/share/local/X11/ for any custom symbols or overrides.

I find a couple of approaches to local customisations which keep the files in the user's homedir.

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/X_KeyBoard_extension#Local_XKB_folder
• http://www.vinc17.org/unix/xkb.en.html

My instinct is to prefer keeping them there, because it should mean that the user can copy his homedir to a new system or distro (or have it propagated over NFS or by a roaming profile) and his customisation(s) will still work (or, at least, the user will have copies of the config files which they can more easily install).

I believe strongly in that kind of separation between _system files that the user has customised_ and _original system files which will be updated and maintained by the package manager_. However it's not clear that it's so clean and tidy with X11, and I can certainly see there's a good argument for CONFIG_PROTECT.

Stroller.