Re: obsolete conffiles: s/may/should/

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Mon, May 06, 2013 at 03:18:04PM +0800, Paul Wise a écrit :
> 
> In policy section 10.7.3 Behavior, there is this sentence:
> 
>         Obsolete configuration files without local changes may be
>         removed by the package during upgrade.
> 
> I would like to suggest that "may" be replaced with "should".

Hi Paul,

do we have an estimate (via piuparts ?) on how many packages are failing to do
that ?  It looks to me that the removal would happen only if the packages are
following the advices of http://wiki.debian.org/DpkgConffileHandling (which now
looks as simple as using dpkg-maintscript-helper via dh_installdeb).

Maybe a few rounds of advocacy for the tools above could be done before making
the recommendation a "SHOULD" statement ?  By the way, I am not sure if "may"
there is meant to be taken in the sense of RFC2119, as the writing style in
10.7.3 is quite casual.  

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan