Help with removal of conffiles
Hi, mentors,
I need help with the removal of obsolete conffiles in bash-completion.
I think I understood what to do, but since I don't know how to
reproduce the problem, I'm uncomfortable with the change. Below, I
give a long description of the problem (feel free to skip it if it
sounds trivial), then I ask the question itself.
* Description of the problem:
Bug report #645439 [1] for bash-completion shows that some conffiles
have been removed from the package, but never purged from users'
systems (apart from the conffiles listed in the bug report, I found two
other files).
In order to learn about conffiles and what package maintainers need to
do in their packages to properly handle them (deletion, updates,
installation), I read the wiki about conffile handling in dpkg [2], as
well as the documentation for dpkg-maintscript-helper [3], and
dh_installdeb [4].
Finally, I read the relevant commits in the repository for the
bash-completion package [5], to try and understand what has already
been done regarding the removal of obsolete conffiles, and I found this
particular commit [6], which adds debian/maintscript.
Since bash-completion 2.0 (actually 1.90), the completion files where
moved from /etc/bash_completion.d to /usr/share/bash-completion, which
rendered a lot of conffiles obsolete. The commit above deals with
these files, but only with the files that were present in the 1.3-x
releases. Files that have been previously removed (such as those
reported in debian bug report #645439 [1]) have never been dealt with,
thus causing the bug.
* Actual question:
Now, I'm planning to add the remaining files (which I tracked down by
examining the history of the repository) to maintscript, but I'm
uncertain about the syntax.
Initially, I thought I should add lines such as:
rm_conffile /etc/bash_completion.d/harbour 1:1.1-1
for conffiles removed in bash-completion version 1:1.1-1.
However, after reading the manpage for dh_installdeb [4] (more
specifically, the section `package.maintscript', I changed my mind and
added lines such as:
rm_conffile /etc/bash_completion.d/harbour 1:2.8-5~
So... Is that the right thing to do? I.e. regardless of the version
at which a conffile was removed, I should use the current release
version in `rm_conffile' calls?
The changes that I'm planning to do are implemented in a staging-area
in the repository by some commits (one for each version that removed a
conffile) [7,8,9,10]. (you are free to check them if that helps)
Thank you very much for your patience in reading up until this point! :)
Kind regards,
Gabriel
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/645439
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/DpkgConffileHandling
[3] https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/dpkg/dpkg-maintscript-helper.1.en.html
[4] https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/debhelper/dh_installdeb.1.en.html
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/tree/conffiles
[6] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/0c22c4ac451d3195da4806728c6ed1163ab88008
[7] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/c9203c53ea75d6fe708bf2deb82f1341072a97db
[8] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/e55d81a56ae89ee0b9cd3bc1e6fc683a33c17991
[9] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/7d413831f1a8ac1181f21efdae594fc8ac5ec0f3
[10] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/2c23594b23c00a663e396d185922e577881e7d16
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