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Re: Removing former conffiles



Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> wrote:

> Right. The problem is that it's not always easy to know if the file
> will no longer be read at all; you can't assume that the administrator
> has left in place your default configuration system.

Of course the maintainer should know their package.  If the binary reads
a configuration file in /usr/share/bla, and in the old version there was
a symlink from /usr/share/bla/bla.conf to /etc/bla/bla.conf, but now the
file is generated from files in /etc/bla/conf.d, sits in /var/lib/bla,
and the symlink points there, it's safe to assume that /etc/bla/bla.conf
is unused.

> [Likewise for
> failure modes on the presence of an obsolete configuration file;
> unless you know for certain that it will fail, you should give the
> administrator some way to override your guess.]

In some cases, yes.  We have cases in teTeX where there are only two
alternatives: Either accept the change, or not install the debianized
package at all and go for /usr/local/ instead.

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



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