On Fri, May 6, 2016 04:36, John Hodrien wrote:

On Fri, 6 May 2016, Gary Stainburn wrote:

...

What I didn't expect, and what really threw me was that this has been implemented via a simply 'yum update' of an existing system, not at a major release level.

Something like RHEL is stuck in a trap here. Either they never change a default post-install (lots of rpmnew or deliberately not introducing new behaviours), or they bring in defaults as you update (to some extent doing things like rpmsave). Some people would complain whichever option they chose.

Or have packagers divide configuration files into system and local with local overriding system. Then restrict software updates such that they modify only system configs leaving locals alone. That way new things can be added with old things are left as they are. Some software already behaves like this. There is no evident technical reason why most of the rest could not as well.

If an update is such that old things cannot be left alone then that is sufficient to require an rpmnew and a warning to the installer that manual intervention is required to complete the update. In fact, anything of that nature would benefit from requiring a special switch to install so that 'yum update' would not break a running system.