Can/should debconf notes still be used?
Hi all,
in the past the use of debconf notes has been discussed, and it seemed
to be general consensus that they are mostly useless (or misused), but
that there are still a couple of legitimate uses which prevent their
removal from debconf (or making them a no-op) [1]
Now I am at the point where I would like to introduce a new debconf
note, and I'd like to request comments before we do that.
We are dealing with the cleanup after bug #420390. Briefly, tetex-base's
postrm was written under the assumption that teTeX is the only TeX
system, and the postrm removes a lot of files below /etc which were
installed by older versions of teTeX - but now with the appearance of
texlive, these files are conffiles of texlive-* again. Some of these
files are essential, texlive-base, texlive-base-bin, or
texlive-latex-base won't configure without them. The postrm has been
corrected now, but many people have already done the purge.
To me, the solution is to resurrect these conffiles without prompting,
because prompting doesn't make sense if the only working answer is
"yes". Even if I know that "preserve local changes upon upgrade"
normally means also to preserve conffile removals - I think this cannot
be applied here. I'm also considering to resurrect the non-essential
conffiles while on the way, either unconditionally or only when the
essential ones were missing, too.
Now the question is, how should we notify the user about what we've
done? Since this is a violation of the letter of policy, I don't think
a remark in NEWS.Debian is appropriate, and I'd like to use a debconf
note of priority "high". But notes are considered deprecated. On the
other hand, it's not an error, so the error type doesn't seem
appropriate...
Comments welcome,
Frank
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.general/106537/
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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