Re: : Question regarding actions to take on --purge of a package.

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:

>  Greg> Now a new version of foo comes out, and a new package libfoo2
>  Greg> is released but it uses the same configuration file as
>  Greg> libfoo1.
> 
> 
> 	*BZZZZZZZT*. Mistake. New package, new configuration file --
>  the postinst should have looked at any previous libfoo1 config file
>  for defaults, but it should have a separate config file. 

That would be clean, but it's not practical, in this case I'm talking about
kerberos and /etc/krb.conf and /etc/krb.realms. These files are standardized
upstream and we can't start moving them around. 

In this case it's not likely to be important because I don't believe many
people used the 0.99 kerberos libraries. However a similar problem is likely
to crop up shortly between heimdal and kerberos4kth. 

But pretty much any library that has configuration files is likely to keep the
same filenames across multiple versions. It would be confusing for the user to
have custom filenames just for debian that's different from the names used for
configuration files from the upstream version.

I guess one option is to have a /etc/libfoo.conf.1 and then link
/etc/libfoo.conf to it in the postinst. Then it points to the most recently
installed configuration. 


-- 
greg