Bug#22935: PROPOSED] Do not make hardlinks to conffiles

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

OK, so where do we stand on this one?

The proposal is to add a requirement to policy (Ron's wording):

  A package may not make hard links to conffiles.
  Rationale: This is because hardlinks are likely to point to the old
  config files after an upgrade, which is probably not the intended
  behavior.

[BTW, Ron wrote:
> minor semantics, yeah.. but only config files that are to be deleted then
> recreated, or renamed, (most of them ;) fall victim to this..
> if only the _contents_ are changed then the link should be ok..

but is not in fact correct, as if you have conffile /etc/foo, hardlink
/var/pkg/foo, and an package upgrade upgrades the /etc/foo confile
(with the installers permission), then /var/pkg/foo ends up pointing
to /etc/foo.dpkg-old, which is not what we want.]

This is one of the proposals which Ian reopened as being important; I
am strongly inclined to agree with him, and therefore second this
proposal, and will include it in the upcoming policy revision unless
anyone has any objections.

   Julian

-- 
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  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
        Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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