Re: Removing former conffiles
On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:21:28PM +0100, Bas Wijnen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After bug report #339387, I added a postinst file to the dummy package
> gnocatan-meta-server, which does
> update-rc.d gnocatan-meta-server remove &>/dev/null || true
> in order to get rid of the links which were created by the previous
> (non-dummy) version of the package.
>
> However, this didn't seem to work. Appearantly this is what happened:
> - The non-dummy package created the conffile
> - The package was upgraded to the dummy version, which no longer held the
> conffile. However, it being a conffile, it was not removed (perhaps this is
> only true if it was actually changed?)
> - On purging the dummy package, the conffile is not removed because it isn't
> listed as part of the package.
> - update-rc.d then refuses to remove the links, because the file is still
> there.
> - Both the conffile and the links remain on the system.
>
> 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...
It is fine to remove the conffile in purge. If you're handling a
nonconffile config file, this is precisely what you [have to] do.
You might also be interested in
http://www.dpkg.org/ConffileHandling
Also in some existing "conffile prompts" bugs:
335276 345112 304066 345113 346282 337992
and the message I sent to them about "transferring conffile ownership".
Justin
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