Bug#72153: tetex-bin should use debconf

[Christoph Martin <martin@uni-mainz.de>]

Petr Cech writes:
 > On Fri, Sep 22, 2000 at 03:42:25PM +0900 , Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
 > > I first simply thought that Michael did not know the mechanism of
 > > conffiles but I think over a bit and come to wonder that it might
 > > be better if we stop to define texmf.cnf as 'conffiles' and treat
 > > its upgrade with debconf.
 > > 
 > > Is it possible and how do you think about this?
 > 
 > It is possible, but can get messy. Look at imp/horde for an example.
 > The problem is, that you must either use only debconf (or your tool) to edit
 > texmf.cnf and check when you last edited, so if admin changes something, that
 > you won't errase there changes on another configure. The second approach
 > is using templates (texmf.cnf.in) to which the admin can make changes and
 > it gets later coppied over texmf.cnf with the debconf values replaced.
 > 

Apache(-ssl) has the same problem with httpd.conf. It is not marked as
a conffile, because several programs/packages try to modify it. At the
first install it is created from an example file to have a default
configuration. On update the update-script tries to figure out via
regexes which parts have to be changed and tries to fix it. But this
is a pain to, because you have to provide for all the changes which
could have happenend in the older releases.

Christoph