Drupal provides a default settings file in sites/default/default.settings.php, which is copied and edited during install. Though version control provides a method to track changes to files, it is sometimes useful to manually inspect the original default.settings.php to see what changes have been made, or copy the file when creating a different instance of the site.
Throughout the lifetime of a site, the .htaccess and robots.txt files may require modifications to the same degree as settings.php. It seems plausible that providing defaults of these (default.htaccess and default.robots.txt) could be useful for sites not implementing version control and for comparing custom modifications.
Comments
Comment #1
jeebsuk commentedI think that's quite a good idea though what's to stop anyone from keeping a backup of the files that are the initial Drupal package? That would achieve the same thing.
Comment #2
c4rl commented@JeebsUK
There's nothing to prevent anyone from keeping their own backups. There is nothing to keep anyone from implementing their own version control via SVN or Git.
I think the distinction I'm making is that these three files (settings.php, .htaccess, and robots.txt) are parts of core that are meant to be modified (as opposed to the rest of core). Providing a default copy allows any modifications to be easily reverted (whether backups or version control are in place or not).
Comment #9
lauriiiIt seems like this issue will be solved by #2982684: Add a composer scaffolding plugin to core which will require us creating default values for all scaffolded files. This will eventually also lead to being able to see the default version of the changed files. Sorry that we didn't get to fix this issue until now.