Does Debian change stuff without asking?

I currently use Mandrake, which is my fisrt, and so far only, distro. I put an old hard drive in, and mandrake automatically made a mount point for it and modified my /etc/fstab without asking.

I changed the line it added to my /etc/fstab and everything was fine until I rebooted. Mandrake then appended the same line to /etc/fstab again (in addition to the line which I had changed). It does this everytime I boot. It is really annoying as one of the changes I made was to add noauto to the /etc/fstab entry (Mandrake's actions defeat the point of adding noauto).

I cannot find any obvious way to stop it doing these things, even in Mandrake Control Center.

I have been considering moving to Debian, or possibly Gentoo, for some weeks now. My question is, does Debian (and Gentoo if anyone knows) do things like this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

I've been primarily using Debian since May, and it hasn't done anything like what you describe. I would imagine Debian, Gentoo, and Slackware are all pretty good about only doing what you tell them to do.

Gentoo will always ask before changing conf files (You use a program called etc-update) but you can screw them if careless. Debian will always ask before replacing them aswell.

if your are thinking about moving to gentoo/slackware/gentoo, good choice.

Debian has good hardware detection but won't do this kind of thng. Debian is a great way to go ;-)

Thanks for all your replies.

It is nice to know that Debian doesn't do stuff without asking. I think I'll be getting Debian, and maybe Gentoo, shortly.