Re: Installing missing conffiles (was Re: dpkg no longer installs conffiles??)

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Wed, 2016-11-30 at 20:25:05 +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:
> On 2016-11-30 14:16 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > On Tue, 2016-11-29 at 19:18:41 +0100, Simon Richter wrote:
> >> To force reinstallation of configuration files, invoke dpkg with the
> >> "--force-confmiss" option when installing. This will only restore
> >> missing configuration files, but not overwrite changed ones. If some
> >> configuration files were damaged, you can use "--force-confnew" to
> >> unpack all configuration files; your old files can be found with a
> >> ".dpkg-old" suffix then.
> >
> > This is I guess, an extended misconception, --force-confmiss will only
> > install missing conffiles if they are missing AND the conffile changes
> > in the new package relative to the one installed (as documented in the
> > man page).
> 
> Really?  This is not what I see here.

Oh wow! Thanks for checking, tracking this down and filing #846395. :)

So it seems I introduced incorrect wording into the man page
description for the --force-confmiss option some time ago, and then
believed my own fantasy, and have been living since in this parallel
universe, where me and the documentation were right, and the actual
behavior and the rest of the world were wrong.

I'll fix the man page and also add regression tests so that this does
not get accidentally changed in the future due to wrong documentation.

Thanks,
Guillem