Bug#246818: Deleting conffiles in maintainer scripts and the need to resurrect them later...
Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> schrieb:
> Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> dpkg will only prompt when the user has changed the file. In this case
>> it is a good thing to prompt him or her, because likely the changes need
>> to be inserted elsewhere.
>
> Right. This seems to me to be a good solution to the problem.
So this would mean:
- we add a remark to each of these files
- for omega.map (and any other resurrected file) we implement a check
whether the file was removed manually (because the local admin found
the "not used" note) or by a maintainer script (in the previous
versions), ask the user and resurrect the file.
>> Yes, moving instead of removing - and we can move it back in postinst if
>> we need it again after an upgrade.
>
> I am not sure maintainer scripts should ever touch conffiles. I was
> under the impression that conffiles should be modified only by the admin
> or by dpkg. But since you played with ucf, perhaps you know more about
> these issues?
You are right, maintainer script should not touch conffiles. What ucf
does is provide conffile-*like* handling for configuration files that
are *not* conffiles.
However, it seems to me that when this chapter in policy was written,
nobody thought about removing conffiles from a package. And in fact ours
is a very special case, since we have so many of them. One more argument
to make them ordinary files again. (But then we need to find a way to do
this cleanly).
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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