I'm not sure I understand the commands in lines 175-177: it looks like this is correcting a bug in the Bookworm code, but I can't tell what it is. If there is one, we should correct it directly rather than force a workaround.
echo " In line 27 of federalist/federalist/scripts/makeConfiguration.py, change"
echo
echo " /.my.cnf --> os.path.expanduser(\"~/.my.cnf\")"
systemConfigFile.read(), the function called in line 27, reads through a list of config files and keeps the values from the last one that it read; since os.path.expanduser("~/.my.cnf") is already in the list after /.my.cnf, the change suggested shouldn't make any difference. Does it?