Re: Recent upgrading notes.
Dale Scheetz writes ("Recent upgrading notes."):
...
> Both the base package and ncurses-base want to create /etc/terminfo.
>
> In both the above cases dpkg-1.1.5aout automaticaly used force overwrite
> to resolve these problems. At what point will force-overwrite go away?
When we have a new unstable tree that isn't the forthcoming 1.1
release.
> Dpkg thinks the new version of ae is a downgrade (493 to 96) but installs
> it anyway. Will dselect do the right thing?
No, it won't. For the moment the package maintainer will have to pick
a really-higher number. In the future dpkg will have a new way to
resolve this.
...
> It seems to me that, at least for passwd and group files (and potentially
> all configuration files), that the conffile method in dpkg is not
> sufficient to the task at hand.
>
> There needs to be a reliable method for merging maintainers changes to
> these files with existing/working versions of these files. In particular
> if a group changes, all users assigned to the previous group and all their
> files and directories, must have the group fields modified to reflect
> these changes. This is not a trivial task, but seems to me to be
> absolutely necessary to fulfill our goals of smooth upgradability for a
> Debian system. Anything short of an intelligent merge leaves the system
> with potential problems.
There are two kinds of configuration files: those of which that the
user can probably just use the standard one (/etc/init.d/foo comes to
mind), and those which require some local configuration.
dpkg's conffiles mechanism works for the first kind, but not really
for the second. The second needs to be handled by specific scripts.
Ian.
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