Ticket #1353 (new defect)
Opened 12 years ago
Stop modifying /etc/services
| Reported by: | vasilvv | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | low | Milestone: | The Distant Future |
| Component: | -- | Keywords: | |
| Cc: | Fixed in version: | ||
| Upstream bug: |
Description
This has been already discussed on Zephyr (without any specific outcome, as I seem to recall). Patching /etc/services is Wrong.
It is explicitly forbidden by Debian Policy (see 11.2). It makes lintian sad. It presents user with a difficult choice of what they want to do with /etc/services whenever the system is reinstalled. It's just not cool.
There are many ways to fix this. One of them is to contact upstream and add ports; this is complicated because some of them conflict with existing IANA-allocated ports and others may be too Athena-specific. Another would be to fix the netbase package and either provide way for packages to do something like /etc/services.d (I believe there was a thing by jhutz which did something relevant?) or just don't add them to services in any way (that's inconvenient though because sometimes having service name aliases is useful).
