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Re: Should ucf be of priority required?



I suspect Patrick might be worried about a scenario like the following.

Lets assume there is a package Foo that depends on and uses ucf. Further the package is the only one ucing UCF on the system.

At some point the admin decides to remove Foo. Since there are no other packages that use ucf on this hypothetical system, the admin also chooses to remove ucf.

The admin purges Foo, but not ucf. Later the user installs some other package that uses ucf.

The net result here is that ucf may be keeping excess state related to package foo. Since it was not around to be alerted when Foo was purged, ucf is unaware that this excess data may no longer needed. Thus any state of ucf related to the package Foo will live on until some point when ucf is purged, or perhaps if Foo is reinstalled, and then re-removed and re-purged.

On the other hand, had the admin purged ucf at the same time that he purged Foo, when ucf was reinstalled later it would start from a clean slate and not keep around this old state that is not terribly useful anymore.

Now I'm not familar enough with ucf to know if this is a real possibility. Perhaps ucf's design has something to prevent such a thing from occuring. I'm not sure. It certainly sounds like a plausible way to leak disk space.


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