Fwd: Re: Adequate reports obsolete conffiles: and now what?
oops, happened to send the reply to James as a PM... here it comes, it
was actually meant for the list
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Adequate reports obsolete conffiles: and now what?
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 16:40:10 +0100
From: Alec Leamas <leamas.alec@gmail.com>
To: James Cowgill <jcowgill@debian.org>
On 21/01/17 13:16, James Cowgill wrote:
Hi,
Hi, thanks for taking time to reply!
By definition, an obsolete conffile is a file which used to be a
conffile, isn't in a new package version, but wasn't moved/removed on
upgrade.
So, when I have done such an operation on purpose, the warning is sort a
false positive, right?
Removing a conffile with dpkg-maintscript-helper will actually move it
(to xxx.dpkg-back) if it was modified, so I think you can safely remove
this as users will still be able to refer to it later.
Well... I have made both manual instructions and a script based on that
hardware.conf is still in it's original location. Of course, the file
should eventually be removed, but doesn't it make make sense to leave it
in it's original location for the first update cycle(s)? Basically,
having it in it's original location IMHO makes it much more visible. Or?
Isn't this the problem conffiles was meant to solve? Dpkg will ask the
user before updating those config files and not touching them is the
default option. This will also warn the user when they may need to
update them anyway (eg new features).
I guess this is a maintainer decision on how they want to do this (even
if I think it's a bad idea) so using .dist files is still OK.
Yes...the lirc history is plagued with some bugs related to this. I'm
not saying that following this scheme is the ultimate solution, but for
better or worse it's a decision I have made.
In this
case, and as long as you're sure your maintainer scripts always do the
right thing, you can ignore adequate.
OK... But "being sure that the maintainer scripts does the right thing"
is not something I feel comfortable with. The conffiles handling is hard
to understand for anyone; it's even harder for me with a RPM background ;)
However I think the .dist files
should be installed in /usr/share and copied from there instead of being
installed in /etc.
This is of course the Right Thing to do. Will implement, thanks!
Cheers!
--alec
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