Bug#535577: debian-policy: what to do with user-generated data (databases) on purge
On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Russ Allbery<rra@debian.org> wrote:
> Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr> writes:
>
>> I tend to agree with you, but I think there is a more fundamental
>> issue: user-generated content should not be stored in /var and should
>> not created and removed by maintainer scripts. (In other word, clearly
>> separated from automatically generated data like MTA queue, etc).
>
> This creates a different problem, namely that now you have to ask the
> user to create a space for that data to be stored and configure the
> package to put it there, which increases the complexity of the package
> setup. I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff.
Is it too much to ask to have a debconf-like thing pop up and say
"Hey, I notice you've got postgres-8.3 data, shall we migrate it to
8.4 for you?"
Or on removal, something like "Removing this package will remove your
data in blahblah. Are you sure you want to continue?" or better yet
"Do you want to remove the data in blahblah? [Yes] [No]" -- so you
could uninstall the package while retaining your own data.
I would say that nothing even in /var should be removed without the
user's consent. Maybe something like a checklist that's like:
[X] Remove log filles
[ ] Remove database files
etc. There are such things during the uninstallation of most programs
on Windows, so why not Debian?
>
> --
> Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
>
>
>
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