Re: Can/should debconf notes still be used?
On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 09:01:20AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> Now the question is, how should we notify the user about what we've
> done? Since this is a violation of the letter of policy, I don't think
> a remark in NEWS.Debian is appropriate, and I'd like to use a debconf
> note of priority "high". But notes are considered deprecated. On the
> other hand, it's not an error, so the error type doesn't seem
> appropriate...
IMHO, documenting a policy violation in a package is never an acceptable
solution, whether that's via NEWS.Debian or a debconf note.
I would rather suggest that this is not a policy violation; policy does say
that "local changes" must be preserved, but a) if the config files were
deleted by tetex this is not a "local change", b) I don't think the
requirement to preserve local changes was ever meant to be taken as "admins
have an inalienable right to screw up a package's installation, and packages
must not try to correct for this", which seems to be the case you're
describing.
C.f. the handling of update-rc.d, which considers the removal of all rc.d
symlinks to be an invalid config and recreates them for the user.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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