backing up/replacing files from another package

[Eric Winger <ewinger@keyww.com>]

The question, basically is this: "How does one have a .deb package which 
replaces/overwrites files from another package (in this case a 
dependency)?"

The specific example is this. We want to use autofs. For our turnkey 
systems, we want to have our own little package, that "configures" the 
autofs configuration a certain way. So we build this package, and cause 
it to depend on autofs. Then, we want to replace the versions of 
/etc/auto.master and /etc/auto.misc that were supplied by the original 
autofs pacakge, and restart autofs. We've tried some interesting 
applications of preinst and postrm, but it doesn't really work right. 
I'm thinking there's got to be a "higher level" way of handling this 
type of scenario.

Thanks to any and all.

Eric & company.