Re: Bug#2160: dpkg conffile upgrades

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Robert Leslie writes ("Bug#2160: dpkg conffile upgrades"):
> dpkg will orphan conffiles which were previously part of a package but aren't
> any longer.

That's right.  This is deliberate.  It's mainly there for complicated
upgrade/replacement operations involving conffiles moving between
packages, but in any case it seems antisocial to remove a conffile
that the user may have edited without asking.

> For example: mount-2.5-4 no longer lists /etc/fstab.sample as a conffile (in
> fact `conffiles' was removed altogether) yet dpkg leaves this file behind
> when upgrading.
> 
> Can this be considered a bug in dpkg, or is the new package really responsible
> for cleaning up the previous version's conffiles (say, via preinst)?

If the files need to be cleaned up, then yes.  I'm closing this bug.

Ian.