Bug#346282: transferring ownership of conffile to avoid dpkg prompt; incomplete solution

[<Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr>]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 10:56:27PM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> At least 4 major packages are presently affected by conffile prompts
> during upgrades from Sarge to current testing, because the name of the
> package owning some conffile changed.  When dpkg queries "what is the
> md5sum of the old conffile", it probably looks only for md5sums of
> files owned by the old package, and so finds nothing, and the usual
> logic doesn't apply.
> 
> See also bullet 3 of Bill Allombert's message titled "Some bits of
> experience gained from handling upgrade-reports"; this is a similar
> situation:
>   http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00006.html
> 
> Bill's simple recipe is to remove the conffile in preinst if the
> md5sum of the conffile matches that of the stable version.
> http://dpkg.org/ has an even better example, which plays nicely even
> for upgrades from versions not in the stable release; it works by
> parsing the dpkg status database with sed (and not distinguising
> between which package owns a conffile).

Hello Rene,

We really have to fix this problem before the release.

What can I do so that this bug is finally addressed ?
Would you accept a patch that remove the offending file in the preinst
if the md5sum match the sarge version ?

Cheers,
Bill.