Re: RFC: amandment to policy (was: purging - what should be deleted ?)
Christian Hammers wrote:
>I propose to include something like to following sentence into the next
>version of the Policy or the packaging-manual to clearify the situation
>below since the actual policy only speaks of config files but not of
>e.g. news articles (from INN), or cached files (squid/wwwoffle) etc.
>
>"When purging a package every file and directory that the package owns
>should be deleted.
>A package owns a file if either it is distributed with this package or
>created by a program which was distributed with this package. Also the file
>must be in a directory which is owned by this package (i.e. not /home/*)."
I don't think this is desirable.
I maintain postgresql, whose database files would qualify for purging
under this proposed policy. Bear in mind that databases can run to multiple
gigabytes of data.
Consider the following scenarios where this policy would be disastrous:
1. Sysadmin hits the wrong key in dselect.
2. User decides to track the upstream source and purges the Debian package.
3. User decides to move package to a different server but deletes the
package before moving the data.
The reason this policy would be wrong is that the data cannot be recreated
by reinstalling the package. The most the purging script should do is
_offer_ to delete the database.
A second problem would be to decide which files had been _created_ by a
package. Unless you install software in every executable to track file
creations, how are you to distinguish between files created by the package
and files created by any random user? The only files a package knows for
sure are its own are those listed in the dpkg database.
--
Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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