Removing self-managed conffiles?

[Marc Haber <mh+debian-mentors@zugschlus.de>]

Hi,

I have a package with a bunch of configuration files that are managed
by my maintainer scripts and not by dpkg. I now need one of them
(a.conf) to vanish.

How do I do this in a clean way? I am thinking about the following:

(1) Let the new package version know about the md5sum of the last
    version(s) of a.conf that were in the package.
(2) If one of the md5sums matches, the file has not been changed,
    remove it.
(3) If none of the md5sums matches, the file has locally been changed,
    rename it to a.conf.package-old

Is that acceptable? Or is there anything easier, more elegant, more
policy compliant?

Greetings
Marc

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