'-r' reset option requires a profile

[Alex Mauer]

Binary package hint: auth-client-config

the '-r' option to auth-client-config requires that a profile be specified as well. There's no reason for this to be the case.

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

Thank you for reporting this issue and helping make Ubuntu even better. The reason '-r' requires the profile name is to aid packaging scripts and for safety. Consider when multiple packages add auth-client-config profiles. If one is removed, it removes the profile and will reset the profile. Without a profile name for reset, the files will get reset automatically, which may not be desired (eg, the user is using a different acc profile provided by another package). Also, consider when the user uses auth-client-config to update nsswitch.conf and the user later updates nsswitch.conf manually. If the user then tries to use auth-client-config to reset the profile and a profile is not specified with '-r', auth-client-config would remove the user's manual changes. Requiring the profile name prevents this.

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

Hmm, I would expect a '-r' option without a profile to reset to a "basic default" configuration (either an ACC pre-defined default profile, or to whatever had been set before acc was ever used.)

Obviously the use-case for /allowing/ a profile option to -r is useful (for the package removal case you describe).

In the last case, doesn't this mean that any user tweaking will completely break acc? If the reset command is run on a user-tweaked setup, I see two options for acc: either remove the user's manual changes (which you say is bad), or do nothing at all. Doing nothing is at least as bad as removing the manual changes. Consider this case: User sets acc to use a given profile; user hand-edits their configuration; user finds they've made a mistake and wants to reset it. If I understand correctly, now acc will refuse to remove the user's changes, and so the user is left with a broken configuration.