One of the very common things that sysadmins do when dealing with morethan one system is that we develop a common set of files that we slapon every system (or in large environments, on subsets of our systems).Sometimes this is done by hand, sometimes this is done with hand-builttools, and sometimes this is done with things like Cfengine or Puppet.

If you accept that packaging systems should be comprehensive , then packaging systems should also supportthis common need. Specifically, packaging systems should have the

I have a number of peculiar opinions about packaging systems in general.One of them is that if you have a good packaging system, you should beable to manage your machine entirely through it; every modification thatyou need to make should be doable as part of a package.

(Okay, not quite every modification; I'll exclude files that arein constant flux outside of your control, like /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow , and operations like rebooting the machine due tonew kernel installations.