rm -rf /usr/somedir in maintainer scripts? (was: dpkg, symlinks, directories)

[Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org>]

"Andrej N. Gritsenko" <andrej@rep.kiev.ua> writes:
> I've solved that in the
> preinst script by 'rm -rf /usr/include/libfm' and I thought yet that was
> a right step since upgrade 1.0.1 -> 1.0.2 went smooth.

Somehow that sounds like a really bad idea to me. Admittedly manually
placing some file in /usr/include/libfm is pretty ugly, but I would
still certainly not expect that upgrading the libfm package would remove
it.

Is that really good practice? Can packages "own" a directory, so that
anything that the local admin puts there may be removed automatically?

Best,

   -Nikolaus

-- 
 »Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a Banana.«

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