On Mon, 2013-05-06 at 17:12 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> do we have an estimate (via piuparts ?) on how many packages are
> failing to do that?
piuparts does test for this, some stats:
sid2experimental 23
testing2sid 12
squeeze2wheezy 209
squeeze2bpo2wheezy 36
lenny2squeeze 47
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=piuparts/piuparts.git;a=blob;f=known_problems/obsolete_conffiles_error.conf;hb=HEAD
Since the program 'adequate' appeared and supports checking for obsolete
conffiles we have been userttagging bugs and found a few of them:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-qa@lists.debian.org;tag=obsolete-conffile;archive=both
On my relatively recently installed machine there are 8 obsolete conffiles:
$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' | grep obsolete | wc -l
8
On a machine that has been running for a few years with apt pinned to
experimental (then sid, testing), there are 59:
$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' | grep obsolete | wc -l
59
On master.debian.org there is only one:
pabs@master:~$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' | grep obsolete | wc -l
1
So the vast majority of packages obey this suggestion.
> 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).
Correct.
> Maybe a few rounds of advocacy for the tools above could be done
> before making the recommendation a "SHOULD" statement ?
While advocacy for removing obsolete conffiles, adequate, puiparts,
lintian and other QA tools is definitely a good idea, I don't think we
need to do that before changing policy. Raphaël Hertzog has done some
advocacy about removing obsolete conffiles in the past:
http://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/10/07/the-right-way-to-remove-an-obsolete-conffile-in-a-debian-package/
http://raphaelhertzog.com/2011/01/31/debian-cleanup-tip-1-get-rid-of-useless-configuration-files/
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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