Bug#162120: debian-policy: Deletion of configuration files--should it be preserved?
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> severity 162120 wishlist
> thanks
>
> justification: this is not a flaw in the policy, at best, this may be
> a proposal to change policy to codifying, in my opinion, a less
> desirable behaviour, and should be treated like any other proposal
> Sorry, this is a bug in those packages. dpkg has always had
> the correct behavour of not reinstalling conffiles that are removed;
> and so do packages managing configuration files using ucf.
>
> Policy, while documenting practice for the most part, should
> not recommend or condone broken behavour just because packages are
> broken.
The example which came up on debian-devel was that if you delete
/etc/inetd.conf, various things will recreate it.
AJ insists that this is the right behavior; you think it's the wrong
behavior. Hrm. I don't particularly care, but I do care that the
packages and the policy should match.
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