Re: the netbase/inetd conspiracy
In chiark.mail.debian.devel, you wrote:
>How about doing the exact opposite of what dpkg does now? Preserve
>changes made to the file, but, if the file's deleted, reinstate it in
>"pristine" form?
Didn't we have this discussion recently? I'm sure there are cases where
a deleted file is treated differently from an empty file by the
application. In that case, restoring deleted files is definitely a bad
idea ("I accidently deleted the binary so reinstalled the package, and
it blew away my configuration!")
>Your train of thought is then "Oh, hell, I've completely wrecked
>this file, I need to start from scratch. Okay, rm /etc/foorc, apt-get
>--reinstall install foo". It's straightforward for programs to work out
>which files need to be reinstated (check for existance), and in almost
>all cases rm'ing the file isn't already useful for anything.
Do we really want to special-case the situations in which it is? I'd
have thought that making --force-confmiss easier to get at through
apt-get (and then documenting this under reinstall so the users are more
likely to find it) would do the job.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.devel@srcf.ucam.org
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