On Wed, Apr 07, 1999 at 12:14:33PM -0400, Raymond A. Ingles wrote: > On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Richard Harran wrote: > > > I'm not sure about this, but perhaps you should remove, rather than > > purge, the xbase package. This is what I did, and I did not get this > > problem. The difference between purging and removing is that removing > > leaves configuration files alone, so perhaps purging xbase removes > > config files necessary to run startx?? > > This appears to be the case. I saved my old XF86Config, reran XF86Setup, > and then replaced the auto-generated XF86Config with my old one. Now > startx works just fine. GACK! I hadn't run across this problem in the versions of XFree86 that were released in the course of stabilizing it after the Great X Reorganization. Yes, this is a serious problem. I am not sure what I can do to fix it; my pre- and post- removal scripts in the current xbase package don't delete those conffiles, dpkg does. It's not easy to change dpkg's mind about such things. I have checked, and the slink xbase package: 1) does not have a prerm script 2) does not have a postrm script 3) does not have a conffiles list In English, this means that when you remove or purge xbase, what SHOULD happen is simply that all the files and directories listed by the dpkg -L xbase command are removed. Is it the case that somehow the old /var/lib/dpkg/info/xbase.conffiles file is being left around? On my system, I even still have xbase installed and it is not there. Is there perhaps some scenario in which the old conffiles file is not removed? If so, this is probably a bug in dpkg, and not in X. In the meantime, I will update the appropriate README files with a dire warning to not purge xbase, but to simply remove it instead. All of xbase's conffiles have migrated to other packages; an enumeration is in the existing xbase/README.Debian. > I guess I'll take a very close look at the docs and see if this needs to > be reported as a bug. I need to examine more closely how I can preserve those conffiles, even in the face of a purge of xbase, which is not an unreasonable thing to do except for this very bad behavior. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | Mob rule isn't any prettier just because branden@ecn.purdue.edu | you call your mob a government. cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |
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