Re: conffile purging and maintainer scripts

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Thomas Hood writes ("Re: conffile purging and maintainer scripts"):
> If a file /etc/foo was formerly a conffile of the package but no
> longer is so then /etc/foo should be dealt with in the preinst or
> postinst.

Regrettably this is currently true.  I think this is a bug in dpkg and
I think I know how to fix it.  I'll see what I can do about it in a
more appropriate venue than debian-devel :-).

> Roger Leigh wrote:
> > 1) sarge -> etch upgrades
> > -------------------------
> > 
> > In order to handle upgrades from sarge correctly, maintainers will
> > still have to manually remove conffiles in their maintainer scripts
> > until at least etch+1 by my reckoning.  Is this correct?

Some of the folklore recipies I've seen for doing this are
fundamentally broken.  They look in /var/lib/dpkg/status (which may or
may not contain the right information) and they use filenames like
*.dpkg-tmp which are reserved for the use of dpkg.

I'm working on grepping archives for affected packages.

Ian.