Re: What should postrm purge actually do?
On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 08:58:54PM +0200, Jeffrey Ratcliffe wrote:
> Fine. Although it always annoyed me that my $HOME filled up with
> spurious dotfiles whose origin I'm not necessarily sure of, and that a
> good installer could know to remove them if the package were purged.
It's important to distinguish between system and user, and the
administrator of a machine isn't always the sole user. If a package is
purged from the system it can deal with all the files it installed or
generated because they aren't needed anymore.
User configuration however isn't tied to the system. The user may have
imported the configuration from some other machine, or intend to use the
configuration elsewhere. The usefulness of user configuration is
therefore not tied to the installed state of the package on this system.
Until we have multi user mind reading hardware tied into dpkg, the only
right thing is to never remove a user's files.
Reply to: