Bug#189370: acknowledged by developer (irrelevant)
reopen 189370
thanks
On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 19:48, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:
> Did you really investigate tetex-bin? It is completely
> irrelevant with the current problem you claimed, I believe.
I did, and I believe it does violate policy. See below.
> It would be possible to preserve local changes with debconf
> in some cases, IMHO, and there might be good reason to set
> default answer to "yes".
Only if you can *perfectly* preserve changes.
> Why except only XFree86? Do you really know every other
> packages situation well enough?
XFree86 should be fixed too.
> I believe we should be, generally, more flexible with conffile
> handling. We need to reset a computer sometimes...
>From my reading of the code here in
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tetex-bin.postinst:
LDAT=/etc/texmf/language.dat
...
if [ -f $DFLT -a -f $LDAT ]; then
db_get tetex-bin/use_debconf || true
if [ "$RET" = "true" ]; then
cp -f $DFLT $LDAT
You just overwrote a configuration file with something else. I could
have easily modified that file.
In fact I just tested this. I have "tetex-bin/use_debconf" set to true,
and then I did: echo '%test' >> /etc/texmf/language.dat, then I did
apt-get install --reinstall tetex-bin. The postinst happily destroyed
my local changes.
Again, using Debconf doesn't give you a license to do this. Please
carefully read Debian Policy, section 11.7.3. See my original mail for
a working solution to this problem.
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