I was wandering around in /etc on a system and found quite a few relics of old postrm's gone bad. Broken /etc/alternitives links, dangling symlinks in directories that nothing owned, etc. The annoying thing was I know what packages were at fault, but they were all long ago purged from the system, and their broken postrm scripts left this stuff behind. At the moment, once a package is purged, we have no way to do anything further. Anything that a broken postrm leaves behind or gets wrong must be found and corrected manually. But I have an idea of a way to change that. Suppose we add a package to debian that in its postrm checks for any bits of detritus left behind by other packages, and cleans it up. Maintainers could, after fixing a bug in a postrm script's purging, also submit a shell code fragement to this package's postinst. If this would be a special-purpose package just for this use, I'd be willing to maintain it. It might make better sense to add it to some base package, but I don't know which one would be appropriate. -- see shy jo
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