Comment 1 for bug 276145

Values at install-time with current Intrepid/apache2 are:

 <Directory />
  Options FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride None
 </Directory>
 <Directory /var/www/>
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  allow from all
 </Directory>

Those are syntactically-correct, sensible and secure default values.

It's true that if you want to do mod_rewrite with .htaccess files, you'll need to change some AllowOverride to allow parsing the .htaccess files. That doesn't mean the default configuration shipped with Apache should change ?