On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 07:23:43AM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote:
> Roger Leigh <roger@whinlatter.uklinux.net> wrote:
> >> This is a directory owned by the dosemu package and it will ensure its
> >> removal upon purging.
> > Why? Just let dpkg remove the conffiles and, if you really must, do
> > something *non-destructive* like:
> dpkg --purge is defined as an operation which removes all traces of a
> package.
And all configuration files, but not all user data. When you purge emacs,
you don't also remove all the text files that you've written with emacs,
eg. Similarly, you don't want your web site rm -rf'ed when you --purge
apache in order to switch to a hand built boa install in /usr/local.
One way of handling this would be to put user data in the /srv top-level
directory. Then you can assume stuff is deleted from /etc and /var on
--remove or --purge, and stuff is only ever deleted from /srv by the
maintainer.
/srv is likely to be in the next release of the FHS, and is already in
use by SuSE and possibly others in (what remains of) the UnitedLinux
crowd. Note that /srv should probably be treated very similarly to
/usr/local -- you shouldn't touch stuff in there, or rely on the layout,
but you might like to make and remove directories in there (but not
touch their contents).
(My understanding of the way -policy works atm is that packages should
simply start using /srv, before we worry about getting it written up
and standardised)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Is this some kind of psych test?
Am I getting paid for this?''
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