Comment 7 for bug 989585

Your report is actually very helpful. Without reports like yours we wouldn't know that people are encountering problems.

You aren't the first one to report that /etc/resolv.conf was immutable when the resolvconf package was installed. It was in response to an earlier such report that code was added to the package's postinst to print out a helpful error message under these circumstances.

We could have gone further and added a line "chattr -i /etc/resolv.conf" to the postinst. But in Debian and Ubuntu we try to respect the administrator's choices and not silently override them, so we didn't add that line. But this decision was based on the assumption that it *is* *administrators* who are setting the immutable bit on /etc/resolv.conf.

Given the fact that so many packages stomp on /etc/resolv.conf I can easily imagine why administrators might resort to this.

But when enough people report exactly the same error it has to make one wonder if there isn't something else going on. Is there, for example, a web page out there somewhere that advises people to set the immutable bit on /etc/resolv.conf as a way of solving the problem of program X stomping on that file? Or is there a package somewhere out there whose maintainer scripts set the immutable bit? If so then we need to know this.
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Thomas