Bug#108587: May packages rm -rf subdirectories of /etc/ ?

[Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net>]

Previously Thomas Hood wrote:
> Agreed, dpkg should do something reasonable when a package
> is replaced and the new version doesn't list all the 
> conffiles that the old one did.  I'd say that it should
> rename such conffiles to $NAME.dpkg-old .  Would that be enough,
> or should the user be asked about it?

That would be horrible since that extension is already used for a
different purpose and might silently remove useful data.

The real question is: what is reasonable behaviour? Keeping the file as
it is sounds reasonable to me: other (possibly modified) files might
refer to it and might suddenly break if a file is removed. An example
of this is upstream renaming or obsoleting conffiles that other tools
also happen to use (this is happening right now in freeradius).

Wichert.

-- 
Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net>      It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                     It is hard to make things simple.