Re: Debconf questions and purge

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Jérôme Marant wrote:
>   I need to merge the wwsympa package into sympa. Both packages
>   use debconf.
>   I wonder how I should merge wwsympa debconf templates into sympa's.
>   In sympa, debconf variables start with sympa/ and wwsympa ones
>   start with wwsympa/
>   If I keep the same variable name, I feel like I'm going to have
>   problem if the user decide to purge wwsympa, because of db_purge.
>   So do I really have to care for the purge and to rename variables?

Well, you basically have two options:

1. Don't change the name. Put identically named wsympa/* templates into 
   sympa and watch debconf do the right thing. (That is, when the new
   sympa is installed, it will mark the templates as shared between the
   two packages that contain them; then when wsympa is purged it will
   remove it from the owners list of the questions but keep them around
   since one other package still owns them. Reference counting.)

2. Change the names and in sympa's config script, use the GET and SET
   and FSET and FGET commands to copy the old values and seen flags of
   the old wsympa questions over.

>   A same kind of problem is likely to happen for the conffiles and other
>   non-conffiles configuration files that I move from wwsympa to sympa
>   and that are been removed in wwsympa postrm.

I'm afraid you're on your own there; dpkg does not deal with shared
conffiles well when the older package is removed I think it removes the
conffile.

-- 
see shy jo