Re: May I temporarily move away a conffile of a conflicting package? [Repost]

[Tore Anderson <tore@linpro.no>]

* Matthias Urlichs

 > > FWIW, I'm in favor of the "move the file away temporarily" solution.

* Thomas Hood

 > This seems to be disallowed by policy 11.7.4:
 > > The maintainer scripts must not alter a conffile of any package,
 > > including the one the scripts belong to.

  Then again, as exim4-base `Replaces' the exim package, policy 7.5.1
 gives a few allowances, including overwriting files from the Replaced
 package.

  Also, the files aren't strictly -modified-, as they are only renamed,
 for the purpose of disabling them (and renamed back if exim4 is
 uninstalled, so reverting to exim3 would work as expected).  When the
 exim (v3) package was created, the "test -x /usr/sbin/exim || exit"
 check was supposed to achieve exactly that, which won't work in this
 situation, unfortunately.

  I believe the right thing to do is to take these extra steps to ensure
 that the scripts will be disabled even if the exim4 packages is installed.

-- 
Tore Anderson