use and abuse of Debconf, follows-up

[jerome.marant@free.fr (Jérôme Marant)]

Hi,

  I'm working on a set of packages that use debconf a lot.

  Each package have its own configuration file and I decided to make
  them conffiles as I want them to be kept during upgrades.  However,
  Policy does not allow conffiles to be modified by maintainers
  scripts.

  Up till now, I have been doing the following :
  * providing a default conffile
  * config
    . reading the conffile (some of the values I want to change)
    . asking questions
  * postinst
    . replacing values in the conffile

  Hence, I'm keeping modifications that were made by hand and I can keep
  those modifications across upgrades.

  The main reason for I've been doing this is that there are a plenty
  of values in the default configuration, and I think it is too huge to
  automatically generate and to get the old values to be reinjected
  in the file. Moreover, a lot of parameters are optionnal and those
  are numerous.

  I know I'm not doing The Right Thing since I'm modifying conffiles
  but I don't understand why this would not be elegant and disgusting.

  I would apreciate any suggestion for improving this.

  Thanks.

-- 
Jérôme Marant <jerome.marant@free.fr>

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