Re: postinst scripts failing because a new conffile wasn't accepted: Is it a bug?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> wrote:

> Scripsit Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>
>> Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> wrote:
>
>>> In the long run, the user-friendly solution is probably to offer (via
>>> a debconf question that defaults to 'yes') to automatically rewrite
>>> the conffile to take the change into account. 
>
>> That can only be done if we change our policy with respect to maintainer
>> scripts changing of conffiles; and that I would not want unless
>> something like ucf does is integrated in dpkg.
>
> Do you mean that every package that offers to edit conffiles based on
> debconf questions is policy-buggy?

Of course, see 10.7.3:

,----
| The easy way to achieve this behavior is to make the configuration
| file a conffile.
| [...]
| The other way to do it is via the maintainer scripts.
| [...]
|
| These two styles of configuration file handling must not be mixed, for
| that way lies madness: dpkg will ask about overwriting the file every
| time the package is upgraded.
`----

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer