Bug#102609: Wanted: dpkg option to consider all confflies in .deb new
It is hard to argue with a one-line "wontfix" tag, but FWIW I'll
second the proposal in bug 102609. Perhaps it was ill received because
of the "beginner" terminology, but I think that the proposed feature
would sometimes be helpful even for people who know what they're
doing.
When one finds that one's attempt to hack some conffiles did not work,
there is no really good way to get dpkg to restore them to the
versions shipped in the .deb, unless one has been cautious enough to
take backups of them oneself.
I was in this situation recently - I tried reinstalling the original
.deb, but dpkg just thought that since the md5sums in the "new" deb
was identical to the ones in /var/lib/dpkg/info, it would not bother
me with offering to install the ones in the package.
In this situation there are basically only two possibilities:
1. Purge the package, then reinstall. Difficult and dangerous if
it is essential or required, or if a lot of other stuff depends
on it.
2. Use dpkg-deb -x to extract the files in /tmp and manually move
them into place. This is doable but tedious; one may have to loop
through the files manually to find the changes, and in general
this involve more typing at a root prompt than I think one should
be forced to do when much of the necessary logic is already right
there in dpkg.
--
Henning Makholm "*Vi vil ha wienerbrød!*"
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