package transition question

[Harald Jenny <harald@a-little-linux-box.at>]

Hi all,

I'm facing a problem and thought maybe someone here has a solution or could
point me into the right direction:
The package openswan currently has version 2.4.12 in Lenny whereas in Squeeze
version 2.6.28 will appear. As the version number suggest this means some deep
changes, also concerning the configuration parameters in the according config
files. With the new version comes an external configuration parsing program
which checks for config errors and warns accordingly. Normally this shouldn't
be such a great issue as major version changes may break configs but as this
package's purpose is secure VPN access we want to take care that the program
is not restarted without proper configuration. We first thought about aborting
the installation in postinst when the config would not run but this would leave
the package in a weird state as the new binaries would have already been
unpacked. Aborting in preinst is also unfeasable because we do not have the
program installed yet so we can't check if the config is ok or not. Our current
idea is to do the installation, run the program in postinst to check for config
errors and if we find some we issue a warning message and cease to restart the
daemon - or does anybody have a better idea?

Kind regards
Harald Jenny