dpkg conffiles weirdness

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

I've just had a bizarre experience upgrading from test-cycle-1 to
test-cycle-2, perhaps someone can shed some light?

I used dselect with an APT backend.  One of the upgraded packages was
xterm, from version 3.3.6-6 to 3.3.6-7.  There's a conffile in the
package: /etc/X11/Xresources/xterm.  I had a modified version, which
was unceremoniously moved to xterm.dpkg-old and replaced by the new
version.  No questions were asked.  (Incidentally, the backspace key
in emacs in an xterm now behaves like ctrl-H.  Any ideas why?  Yuck!) 

I tried reinstating the old xterm conffile and reinstalling version
3.3.6-7, but now the conffile wasn't touched.  I then tried deleting
the conffile and reinstalling; no conffile was installed at all this
time.  Purging and reinstalling reinstalled the conffile, but nothing
less would do so.

Does anyone have a clue what might be up?

   Julian

-- 
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  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
        Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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