Re: Removing former conffiles

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Bas Wijnen <shevek@fmf.nl> wrote:

> The question is, how do I solve this?  Should I forcefully remove the conffile
> before calling update-rc.d?  It feels really bad to remove files from /etc in
> maintainer scripts, but perhaps it's the right thing to do...

I've come across this several times, and what I did was

- check the md5sum of the installed file
  * against the md5sum known to dpkg (not possible if the package was in
    "rc" state)
  * against known md5sums hardcoded into the maintainer script

- if the file is unchanged, remove it

- if it is changed, either keep it and insert a comment at its beginning
  that it is unused, or move/rename it.  In all cases where the file's
  presence could have a bad effect, I renamed or moved it.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)