Re: Debconf questions and purge

[jmarant@nerim.net (Jérôme Marant)]

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:

> 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.)

  Smart ;-) I love this. You've made my day!

>>   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.

  I see no real solution to this.

  One disgusting way for non-conffiles would be to delete the removing
  part:

  if [ -e /var/lib/dpkg/info/wwsympa.postrm ]; then
      sed ....
  fi

  I think you won't like this, will you? ;-)

-- 
Jérôme Marant

http://marant.org