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

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Peter Samuelson]
> 'conffile' is dpkg jargon that has a specific meaning: configuration
> files that dpkg handles specially w/r/t upgrades and removals.  Editing
> a conffile at install time makes no sense.  If you want to edit a
> configuration file, don't ship it as a conffile - in fact, don't ship
> it at all.  Either generate it ex nihilo from a script, or if you feel
> you need a template, ship the template under another name, to be copied
> from if the file doesn't already exist.

Or even better, ship the defaults in /usr/share/, load them from there
and load overrides from /etc/ if a file exist there.  If you want the
package to have install time defaults, generate the file in /etc/
based on install time input.  This way you can handle upgrades
gracefully when changing the defaults, without loosing local
configuration overrides.