Bug#707077: obsolete conffiles: s/may/should/

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Package: debian-policy
Severity: wishlist

Le Mon, May 06, 2013 at 06:09:48PM +0800, Paul Wise a écrit :
> 
> $ 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.

Hi Paul,

this is for the conffiles, but as worded in your suggestion, packages should
also do this for the other configuration files.

Anyway, I do not think that the Policy 3.9.5 will be uploaded soon (it still
needs to get sections on the triggers and on multi-arch), so this leaves some
time to see how well received is the idea, and if unexpected shortcomings are
found.

Would you or somebody else have time for one more round of advocacy ?  If I
understand well, since the Wheezy release it is not needed anymore to
pre-depend on dpkg to use dpkg-maintscript-helper, so passing this message
would be a good opportunity to spread the idea.

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan