Re: Files which do not belong to installed packages...
Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es> writes:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 1998 at 01:25:24AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > Well, /var is designed for that, of course. However, last time I checked,
> > a basic install (base system + dselect defaults) did not install
> > a kernel-image package, so the kernel itself does not belong to a package!
>
> Yeah, that's a known bug (and a really old one too!). The problem is not
> the kernel, but the modules. As any user can change the kernel and
> modules used in the boot-floppies, I haven't found an easy way to feed
> dpkg databases with the proper package information. As always, patches
> are welcome! ;-)
What we really need is something like a dpkg-register program, which
allows a package to assert its ownership over a file (it should
probably also allow a package to register new conffiles) - if we had
such a thing, the install process could install an essentially empty
package but the register the kernel and modules as belonging to it.
The initial post suggested the auto-deletion of conffiles which are no
longer used by new packages - this is a mistake, in general.
Conffiles which haven't been modified for local use could be deleted
in this way, but otherwise conffiles should be removed only after the
local sysadmin has had a chance to look through the old files and take
any local edits out and put them into the new conffiles. The
information necessary to make this determination is in fact already
kept by dpkg - why we don't make dpkg use it is unknown.
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