Bug#223463: Should "dpkg -r" delete unmodified conffiles?
Package: dpkg
Version: 1.10.18
Severity: minor
Installing and removing packages leaves one with
dozens or even hundreds of junk files in /etc
and other places. This is undesireable.
As I understand this, from the dpkg man page,
the intent behind this behavior is to allow you to
preserve system-specific configuration information.
That way, when you re-install a package that you
hand-configured once, it doesn't have to be hand-confured
again.
Now, one can get rid of them with a "dpkg -P",
but that (as I understand it) gets rid of *all* files.
Thus, any hand-configuration information is lost.
Neither option is quite right. "-r" leaves useless
junk around, and "-P" can delete important information.
What dpkg needs to do, it seems, is to delete
all config files that haven't changed,
and the leave the conffiles that have been modified.
This would seem to be the best of both worlds,
leading to a less-cluttered system, but still preserving
any modifications.
I'd suggest that this be made the default -remove behavior,
but perhaps it might be best to add a new flag.
If my reading of the man pages is incorrect, then
this should probably become a bug report on the man page.
"-P or --purge removes everything" is pretty clear,
as is "-r or --remove remove everything except configuration files".
As a third possibility, it may be that many packages
are listing junk files as configuration files.
For instance, many packages leave files in /etc/rc*.d
after removal. Normally, those are just symlinks to
/etc/init.d/something. Why should they be preserved,
even if /etc/init.d/something is worth preserving?
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux gpk 2.4.23 #2 Sun Dec 7 11:46:58 GMT 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
Versions of packages dpkg depends on:
ii dselect 1.10.18 a user tool to manage Debian packa
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-10 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
-- no debconf information
Reply to: