Re: "All packages use debconf"

[Colin Walters <walters@cis.ohio-state.edu>]

Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org> writes:

> I think that's a good compromise for packages that need debconf. I
> think it's a step backwards for packages that previously used a
> perfectly good default conffile, and were debconf'd for no good
> reason, because before if I hadn't touched the file, it would be
> updated with the new settings transparently, and if I had changed
> it, dpkg warned me, and gave me a chance right then to compare,
> choose, or integrate by hand.

Ok.  Maybe instead of just noticing the file exists, if its md5sum
differs from the distributed version, we offer to either cancel and
use the existing configuration file, or blow the current one away and
configure it using debconf.

If the md5sum is the same as the distributed version (or the file
doesn't exist at all), then we just go into debconf, using the same
defaults as distributed in the original /etc/foo/bar.conf.

I agree that the problem is that it is hard to know whether
dpkg-reconfigure foo will try to integrate your existing changes or
not.  I certainly wouldn't expect a maintainer to go to all the
trouble of doing that, as it's not entirely trivial in most cases. For
package maintainers who chose not to implement it, the above algorithm
I think would nicely preserve the ability to use dpkg-reconfigure, yet
make sure that the user's conffiles aren't modified without
confirmation.