Re: [Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#716948: initscripts: Removes bootlogd conf files even if bootlogd is installed

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 18:37:51 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Attached is a tested patch for this.  I'm not thrilled about invoking
> dpkg-query -S here, but I don't see any other way to get this information.

You could check instead if the package owns the conffile either with
«dpkg-query -L» or «dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n'» (non-obsolete
entries). Also the check could be refactored into a new function.

With these fixed I'll merge it for 1.17.0.

> It also still doesn't give perfect results; if a conffile moves from package
> x to package y, and package x is unpacked before package y, a modified
> conffile will be left behind as <conffile>.dpkg-bak and the pristine
> conffile from the new package will be unpacked in its place.  But I believe
> it is at least as good as the existing code in all cases.

I'm not going to ponder how this could be fixed with the script, but
that's one of the reasons native support would solve stuff like this,
as the desired action would be tracked in the dpkg database, and the
files would use the standard extensions.

Thanks,
Guillem