Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add perl-db_file.

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Hello,

On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 09:01:38PM +0200, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> Yeah, I thought about it but decided against it - there are very few options in that file, substitute* can't substitute entire lines (or only at the beginning of the line) or entire words (so it's not safe), the user is supposed to set PREFIX and HASH (it's just a coincidence we didn't have to change them) and if we did that then new versions of the package could sneak in new options we wouldn't notice but we should have changed. Better for it to fail instead of silently doing something strange.

well, substitute* is closer to a diff - it makes it easy to see what actually
changes. And I would make the converse argument of you - for the next version,
if more things change (an option is added to the file, for instance), then
the substitute* still has a chance to get a working package. Imagine that
someone without knowledge of the package might be the one to update it, for
instance.

I pushed with tiny changes to the description.

Thanks!

Andreas