Re: Removal of user-edited configuration files?
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 11:30:55AM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> Frank Lichtenheld <frank@lichtenheld.de> schrieb:
>
> > If someone requests to "purge" a package, he doesn't want this. He asked
> > you to remove anything you brought with you from his system. So why
> > check if he modified the configuration file? If he would care about the
> > changes he could have used "remove".
>
> Consequently I should remove the whole directory /etc/$progname/,
> irrespective wether there are still files in there? Or, if not, what is
> the difference between foo.cfg and bar.cfg, despite the fact that a long
> time ago the package created a file with the name foo.cfg, but not
> bar.cfg?
Hmm. There are two questions here:
Q1: Should I blindly remove a configuration file I once created in a
maintainer script? (on purge)
A: IMHO yes. But Policy 10.7.3 is not quite clear in this case.
I would not trust my English enough to decide whether
"configuration files must be preserved when the package is removed, and
only deleted when the package is purged." should read "must be deleted on
purge" or "can be deleted on purge".
Q2: Should I remove files the user generated on his own (e.g. in
/etc/progname)
A: IMHO no. These files are not generated by your package (i.e. his
maintainer scripts), so how have you the right to decide what to do with
them? Some people do a `rm -rf' on directories the package created
(e.g. under /etc/ or /var/) but I believe there are enough
flamewars^Wdiscussions in the archive of debian-devel you could refer to
to decide if you want to do this. (The last one seems to be
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200307/msg00919.html)
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld <frank@lichtenheld.de>
www: http://www.djpig.de/
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