89

Chapter 11

Customized programs

11.1 Architecture specification strings

If a program needs to specify an architecture specification string in some place, the following

format should be used: arch os

1

.

Note that we don't want to use

arch

 debian linux

to apply to the rule

architecture

vendor

os

since this would make our programs incompatible with

other Linux distributions. We also don't use something like

arch

 unknown linux

, since the

unknown

does not look very good.

11.2 Daemons

The configuration files

/etc/services

,

/etc/protocols

, and

/etc/rpc

are managed by

the

netbase

package and must not be modified by other packages.

If a package requires a new entry in one of these files, the maintainer should get in contact with

the

netbase

maintainer, who will add the entries and release a new version of the

netbase

package.

The configuration file

/etc/inetd.conf

must not be modified by the package's scripts ex 

cept via the

update inetd

script or the

DebianNet.pm

Perl module. See their documenta 

tion for details on how to add entries.

If a package wants to install an example entry into

/etc/inetd.conf

, the entry must be

preceded with exactly one hash character (

#

). Such lines are treated as  commented out by

user  by the

update inetd

script and are not changed or activated during package updates.

1

The following architectures and operating systems are currently recognized by

dpkg architecture

. The

architecture,

arch

, is one of the following:

alpha

,

arm

,

hppa

,

i386

,

ia64

,

m68k

,

mips

,

mipsel

,

powerpc

,

s390

,

sh

,

sheb

,

sparc

and

sparc64

. The operating system,

os

, is one of:

linux

,

gnu

,

freebsd

and

openbsd

. Use of

gnu

in this string is reserved for the GNU/Hurd operating system.