On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 10:59:17AM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote: > True, dpkg's behaviour is rather surprising when new Debian admins > first run into it. However, once they have learned that the packaging > system works this way, it would be cruel to make that behaviour inconsistent. > > > I can definitely see room to enhance our current toolset with a view to > > being more friendly towards the variety of wishes users have. > Indeed. I can't think of a good way, though. How about doing the exact opposite of what dpkg does now? Preserve changes made to the file, but, if the file's deleted, reinstate it in "pristine" form? Your train of thought is then "Oh, hell, I've completely wrecked this file, I need to start from scratch. Okay, rm /etc/foorc, apt-get --reinstall install foo". It's straightforward for programs to work out which files need to be reinstated (check for existance), and in almost all cases rm'ing the file isn't already useful for anything. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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