Re: Should ucf be of priority required?

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2009-12-05 16:47 +0100, Patrick Schoenfeld wrote:

> Hi,
>
> when testing my packages with piuparts I noticed an inability of
> our package management. Dpkg does not have support for management
> of dynamically generated configuration files. Therefore some packages
> now use ucf.
>
> The basic usage is somewhat like
> - Registering config files to ucf on installation
> - Using it when configuring the package to merge configuration updates
>   and local changes
> - Unregistering config files to ucf on purge

  - Removing config files on purge

> The crux is the last point. For a good reason postrm must not require
> tools it depends on to be around when removing the package itself.
> So the call of ucf looks something like that:
>
>     if which ucf >/dev/null; then
>         ucf --purge /etc/foo.conf
>     fi    
>
> That is okay, as long as ucf is around. But as soon as it isn't
> the purge of a package is succesful while leaving modified files around.

It is the package's responsibility to remove those files, "ucf --purge"
does not do that, see ucf(1).

> So the effect is that a purge does not "remove everything".
>
> Do we really want that? Should ucf be 'required' to avoid that?

That would be no good.

Sven