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

[Andreas Enge]

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