How to restore original conffiles?
Hello.
(I just subscribed; apologies if this subject has come up
recently. The archive search at www.debian.org did not know anything
about "conffiles", though).
The short story: How do I tell dpkg to re-install the conffiles in a
package, overwriting any changes I've made myself?
The long story:
The other day I upgaded to hamm. Everything went along smoothly, only
I lost the changes I'd made to /etc/terminfo/l/linux so the
line-drawing characters (dialog and friends) would work with a latin1
font. This was on purpose; I had saved a backp of my old terminfo
entry so I could hack it up once again after the upgrade.
Unfortunately I failed to hack it up properly, and ncurses-based
applications began doing rather strange things to the display. No
big deal, I thought, we can just pull back pull back the original
terminfo from ncurses-base_blahblah.deb and being more careful with
the hacking the next time.
Which turned out to be easier said than done. Trouble is, ncurses-base
declares /etc/terminfo/l/linux as a conffile, which makes dpkg think
that any changes I make to it - even removing it - are on purpose and
not anything I would ever want to reconsider until a new version of
the package appears with a changed original file.
I could not find any switches to tell dpkg that I *want* to lose my
changes to this or that conffile, so eventually I ended up purging
the whole package (use the --force!) and installing it anew.
Surely that cannot be the only way to deal with such a situation? What
have I missed - apart from backing up the file in question before
hacking on it, but the original *was* there on the cdrom, right?
--
Henning Makholm
http://www.diku.dk/students/makholm
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