Bug#907313: Lack of guidelines on purging conffiles in stateless packages
Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> writes:
> I think the distinguishing factor here is whether a pathname is a
> configuration file or a configuration fragments directory. So, I'd
> say:
> * configuration file → /etc/foo/foo.conf → remove on purge, even if
> the package did not ship a file there, because this is "virtually"
> owned by the program/package (and I can see in the future these
> being marked as ghost conffiles in the dpkg metadata manifest, for
> example).
> * configuration fragment directory → /etc/foo/foo.d/* → do not remove
> on purge, unless the package ships or creates these itself. This
> preserves local admin changes, and changes from 3rd party packages.
This makes sense to me, and your first case would apply if the package has
a specific number of configuration files that can be shadowed in /etc.
My subjective impression (and I might be wrong here) is that it's more
common for packages that support this style of configuration to also
support fragment directories, for all the reasons that fragment
directories are a good idea anyway. So I think this policy would lead to
normally not removing most administrator configuration. Does that sound
right?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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