Re: deb-cfmgr: Debian conffile prompting tool.

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Tom Rothamel writes ("Re: deb-cfmgr: Debian conffile prompting tool."):
> As a first draft, realizing that the documentation is missing, how
> does the folloing patch look. It provides a new dpkg option, 
> --conffile-prompt-command, that executes a program with the canonical
> name and the current file name of a conffile as arguments. If the exit
> code of that program is 0, the file is kept. If it's 1, the file is
> replaced, otherwise the current prompting code is run.

That interface doesn't give the prompting program all the information
and opportunity to make decisions that dpkg has.

dpkg makes a decision about conffiles for _every_ conffile, not just
changed ones.  It knows whether the upstream version has changed, or
whether it's new, and whether the installed version has been edited by
the admin.  It only currently prompts when both have changed.

If this is to be done, then the interface should be such that the
external program can make _all_ of these decisions: for example, I
should be able to say `high prompting' and get asked individually for
even conffiles I haven't edited, or some such.

Ian.