Chapter 10. Files

84

10.7.5 User configuration files ( dotfiles )

The files in

/etc/skel

will automatically be copied into new user accounts by

adduser

. No

other program should reference the files in

/etc/skel

.

Therefore, if a program needs a dotfile to exist in advance in

$HOME

to work sensibly, that

dotfile should be installed in

/etc/skel

and treated as a configuration file.

However, programs that require dotfiles in order to operate sensibly are a bad thing, unless

they do create the dotfiles themselves automatically.

Furthermore, programs should be configured by the Debian default installation to behave as

closely to the upstream default behaviour as possible.

Therefore, if a program in a Debian package needs to be configured in some way in order to

operate sensibly, that should be done using a site wide configuration file placed in

/etc

. Only

if the program doesn't support a site wide default configuration and the package maintainer

doesn't have time to add it may a default per user file be placed in

/etc/skel

.

/etc/skel

should be as empty as we can make it. This is particularly true because there is no

easy (or necessarily desirable) mechanism for ensuring that the appropriate dotfiles are copied

into the accounts of existing users when a package is installed.

10.8 Log files

Log files should usually be named

/var/log/

package

.log

. If you have many log files, or

need a separate directory for permission reasons (

/var/log

is writable only by

root

), you

should usually create a directory named

/var/log/

package

and place your log files there.

Log files must be rotated occasionally so that they don't grow indefinitely; the best way to do

this is to drop a log rotation configuration file into the directory

/etc/logrotate.d

and use

the facilities provided by logrotate.

7

Here is a good example for a logrotate config file (for more

information see

logrotate(8)

):

/var/log/foo/*.log {

rotate 12

weekly

compress

postrotate

/etc/init.d/foo force reload

endscript

}

7

The traditional approach to log files has been to set up ad hoc log rotation schemes using simple shell scripts

and cron. While this approach is highly customizable, it requires quite a lot of sysadmin work. Even though the

original Debian system helped a little by automatically installing a system which can be used as a template, this

was deemed not enough. The use of

logrotate

, a program developed by Red Hat, is better, as it centralizes log

management. It has both a configuration file (

/etc/logrotate.conf

) and a directory where packages can drop

their individual log rotation configurations (

/etc/logrotate.d

).