retitle 108587 dpkg: a conffile that vanishes across an upgrade can fool dpkg retitle 182021 dpkg: reappearing conffile that had vanished fools dpkg reassign 182021 merge 108587 182021 thanks Adam Heath and I have discussed this on IRC. Quoting the logs of #182021: > /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/czsk is tagged as a configuration file, however it > contains a version string. Consequently, the user is prompted during > upgrade: [...] > Despite no changes having ever been made. That's not why you're being prompted. You're being prompted because the file stopped being shipped as part of the package a while back, but now is being shipped again. Vanishing conffiles are not deleted when a package is upgraded. Therefore, dpkg thinks you're installing a new conffile on top of some non-packaged previously-existing version which you must have created. Dpkg is wrong, of course. Dpkg has no mechanism to handle conffiles disappearing across upgrades. > Is this just an implementation choice in dpkg, or is there > insufficient information in the existing .deb files to enable > dpkg to, say, remove unmodified configuration files when a > package is being deleted, even if it's not being purged? The latter. > (It is conceivable that someone, somewhere is depending upon > deletion-without-purging to leave even unmodified configuration > files intact, but I assume that the idea behind > deletion-without-purging is to preserve local _changes_, not > just local copies of a removed package's standard out-of-the-box > configuration.) There should probably be a prompt for disappearing conffiles, similar to the one that is used for changing conffiles. -- G. Branden Robinson | Men use thought only to justify Debian GNU/Linux | their wrong doings, and speech only branden@debian.org | to conceal their thoughts. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Voltaire
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