Bug#470633: Explicitly say obsolete configuration files may be removed

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> writes:
> On Mon, 2009-09-07 at 14:42:46 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Also, if I remember this discussion correctly, Policy currently could
>> be read as saying that a package isn't permitted to remove its obsolete
>> configuration files, so we should at least fix the wording to make it
>> clear it's permitted for packages to do that.

> Right, I think policy should allow it, as currently the maintainer is
> the one knowing if the conffile is being switched to a configuration
> file or is just obsolete, and in that later case if it might create
> problems to keep it around.

> But I think this is something that should be handled by dpkg itself in
> the future when we have the dpkg-conffile program. What to do then is
> something to be discussed when we create such interface, but there's
> already some proposal on #108587.

I have applied the following patch to Policy for the next release.  I
believe this was already the intention and this is therefore just a
clarification, so I applied it without waiting for seconds, but if anyone
feels a more formal process should be used, let me know.

I haven't made any more substantial changes to, for instance, require that
packages remove obsolete configuration files.  If people would like to
pursue that, I'd prefer to clone a new bug for that; this bug started with
the misunderstanding that Policy didn't allow it.

diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index da3a687..f0ba54e 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -7546,6 +7546,8 @@ ln -fs ../sbin/sendmail debian/tmp/usr/bin/runq
 		  package is purged.
 	      </item>
 	    </list>
+	    Obsolete configuration files without local changes may be
+	    removed by the package during upgrade.
 	  </p>
 
 	  <p>

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>