dpkg-reconfigure hacking in postinst

[Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>]

Hi Joey,

I have a prospective package that checks for the environment variable
DPKG_RECONFIGURE=1 in the postinst, and if it decides that it's being
reconfigured, it will overwrite its configuration file (not a conffile)
based on the debconf answers.  The theory is that if a user reconfigures
a package using dpkg-reconfigure, he most likely will want to generate a
new configuration file.  The old file is backed up, of course.
Otherwise the postinst script will leave the file alone.

My sponsor told me that he thought he recalled you previously mentioning
that you frowned upon this sort of hackery, and that I should check with
you.

Unfortunately, this is one of those configuration files that is
difficult to parse, so I'm not sure how else to handle the file in
postinst.  I'd really prefer to avoid a situation where the file is
either absolutely managed by debconf or not at all, or a file with a
"hands-off" section that the user isn't allowed to touch.

I think the optimal solution would be this one brought up by Matt
Zimmerman recently:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200210/msg01533.html

but I'm not sure what to do until that gets implemented.

Thanks,
Brian

-- 
People said I was dumb, but I proved them!