Bug#47267: in tests, conffile never deleted by purge after replacement

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>]

Adam Heath wrote:
> I don't care what you have seen.

Regardless, I went ahead and conducted more experiments using
a couple of packages I cooked up to test dpkg.

I found that when the two packages had the same conffile,
and the second was declared as either Conflicts:ing with the first
or Replaces:ing the first or both, and regardless of whether the
conffile was modified or unmodified after it was installed by the
first package, the conffile was *never* deleted when the first
package was purged at the end of the following sequence:
   1. dpkg --install foo1
   2. dpkg --remove  foo1
   3. dpkg --install foo2
   4. dpkg --purge foo1

I also tried the case where the second package Replaces: the
first but does not Conflicts: with it, and found that
regardless of whether or not the conffile was modified after
it was installed by the first package, the conffile was *not*
deleted when the first package was purged at the end of the
following sequence:
   1. dpkg --install foo1
   2. dpkg --install foo2
   3. dpkg --purge foo1

Possibly there was once a bug, but it was inadvertently fixed?

--
Thomas