apt-get question
I've encountered something that I don't know if it's a bug or what.
Background: I had installed a local compile of XFree 4.3.0 some time
ago. I'd installed it in /usr/local, but somehow, the /etc/X11 stuff
got stored under /etc/ instead of /usr/local/etc. My system is testing,
and I finally decided to install the 4.3 stuff after they came into
testing.
Now, the question: After the install, I still had a few files under
/etc/X11 that still belonged to group "staff". It appeared that all
these were identical in content to the install package files, but in
order to be "clean", I decided to reinstall the packages and get them
all with correct ownership and dates.
One directory was xkb. I did mv xkb xkb.local and reinstalled
xbase-clients and xlibs, using "apt-get install --reinstall. What I
wound up with was xkb and all the subdirectories but NO FILES AT ALL.
Upon rerunning apt-get.. , and doing a "dir" of xkb in another window, I
saw that during the install, the files in the top directory, (xkb), were
there, all as <file>.dpkg-new, but after the install ended, all these
files were gone!
Now.. what happened? Have I encounterend a bug? My guess is that with
a reinstall, the packages were put there, but somehow, since there was
not an "old" file, they were deleted rather than renamed.
I don't have enough knowledge about the process to really know what's
happening. Would anyone care to explore this further? If this is the
case with all packages, then it would be impossible to replace a file
that accidentally got deleted. But, I am afraid I'm missing something
and don't want to file a bug report without being more sure of what's
really going on.
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