On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 06:23:14PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: > I wrote: > > Policy says that purge is to remove all files created by dpkg or the > > maintainer scripts plus all logs. That's a long way from "rid all traces". > > Matthew Palmer writes: > > What traces of a package should be left after a purge, then? > > Anything the program created other than logs. Would you want all files > created by vi removed? Files created by vi aren't a part of the vi package, any more than the HTTP data sent by apache is part of the apache package. But logfiles are "package droppings", like vi crash restore files (I can't remember what they're called, those things that get stored to some fiddly directory somewhere and annoy me on reboot). I *would* expect those to get cleaned up on package purge. > Seems to me that it should be quite sufficient to interpret "remove logs" > as "remove logs created by the default configuration". Attempting to parse > configuration files and ferret out all logs could lead to data loss. We've already covered why that's a bad idea. What is considered "default" can change over the time that the package is installed on a system, making it difficult for the admin to determine what is to be done on purge. On the other hand, a policy of "if you purge, expect to lose any logs created during the package's operation" is simple and straightforward to understand and work around. - matt
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