How to handle conffiles when renaming or splitting a package?
Hello everybody,
and happy new year !
I have recently split the mime-support package in two: media-types and
mailcap. But I wonder if I handled the conffiles correctly.
mime-support had the conffiles `/etc/mime.types` and
`/etc/mailcap.order` until version 3.64. Version 3.65 is a transitional
package containing only a changelog and a copyright file, and depends on
media-types and mailcap. And these two packages declare a Breaks and
Replaces relationship against mime-support << 3.65.
As a result of the upgrade, the conffiles are now owned by the new
packages. But dpkg still keeps a record that the mime-support has
the "obsolete" version of them:
# dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' media-types
/etc/mime.types 43fa90aa9a5e009997f451be169ac530
# md5sum /etc/mime.types
43fa90aa9a5e009997f451be169ac530 /etc/mime.types
# dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' mailcap
/etc/mailcap.order ba07e08a7fe3741d0b8339127963190e
# dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' mime-support
/etc/mime.types 0d516753aee0a2c670c79667aad0c836 obsolete
/etc/mailcap.order ba07e08a7fe3741d0b8339127963190e obsolete
I have received reports from users who consider this a problem. Indeed,
in the case of mailcap it is potentially confusing as the conffile's MD5
sum has not changed.
On the other hand, once mime-support is purged, which is how
transitionnal packages eventually should be handled, the situation is
clean. So I am not sure if there is a problem here.
Is it needed to clean dpkg's database so that it does not report
obsolete conffiles for mime-support? (Actually, I would have expected
dpkg to do this automagically given the Breaks and Replaces
relationship.)
Have a nice day,
Charles
--
Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Tooting from work, https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy
Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
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