Debian and Ubuntu make use of the !includedir directive at the end of the packaged my.cnf to allow for extending and overriding their default configuration without having to modify the distribution config file.
This is especially nice in combination with configuration tools like puppet as it is usually much easier to add a file to the system than to modify an existing file.
I ran into a small gotcha with this though: the default my.cnf binds mysqld to the localhost TCP interface so that it listens IP 127.0.0.1 only. To make the mysql server reachable from other hosts the bind=127.0.0.1 setting needs to be overwritten.
How to change the binding to a different IP should be obvious, but how to disable an existing binding completely if you want your mysqld to listen on all available interfaces?
The most obvious would be to simply say
bind=
, this does not have any effect though. What needs to be done instead is
bind=0.0.0.0
to make mysqld listen on all interfaces again.
This is obviously a solution for IPv4 only, for allowing incoming connections from all v4 and v6 interfaces allowing bind= without any argument to reset any existing bindings would probably be more clever?