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

["Andrej N. Gritsenko" <andrej@rep.kiev.ua>]

    Hello!

Nikolaus Rath has written on Saturday, 29 September, at 18:56:
>"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?

    Probably I'm wrong in that. Do you think preinst script should fail
instead if target-to-replace directory is not empty?

    Andriy.