conffiles, pbuilder and missing md5sums (?)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi,

I thought that, before showing the "conffile changed by you or a script"
dialog, dpkg would check whether the file was changed by comparing with
the stored md5sums of the file. However...

In a woody pbuilder environment, when I install tetex-base, e.g., none
of the files listed in /var/lib/dpkg/info/tetex-base.conffiles have an
entry in the corresponding md5sums file, and some packages (e.g. sed)
don't have a md5sums file at all (while others do have entries for /etc
in their md5sums files, e.g. passwd).

So how can dpkg tell then for tetex-base which conffiles have been
modified? It must be able to do this somehow, because it doesn't prompt
for every conffile (but did ask for some, before ucf was introduced).

Thanks in advance,
Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie