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Re: Will somethings break if an administrator removes a file marked as conffile?



Regid Ichira wrote:
>   Will the debian management system interpret a missing conffile as
> though it was removed by the system administrator?

Yes.  A missing conffile has been determined to a local configuration
and will be preserved upon upgrades.

You can use the dpkg option --force-confmiss to force dpkg to install
conffiles that have been removed upon upgrade.  This is what I desire
and so I set the following in my /etc/apt/apt.conf file.

  DPkg::Options::="--force-confmiss";

The dpkg man page has this documentation:

              confmiss: Always install a missing conffile. This is dan‐
              gerous, since it means not preserving a change (removing)
              made to the file.

              confnew: If a conffile has been modified  always  install
              the   new   version   without   prompting,   unless   the
              --force-confdef is also  specified,  in  which  case  the
              default action is preferred.

              confold:  If a conffile has been modified always keep the
              old version without prompting, unless the --force-confdef
              is  also  specified,  in which case the default action is
              preferred.

              confdef: If a conffile has been  modified  always  choose
              the default action. If there is no default action it will
              stop  to  ask  the   user   unless   --force-confnew   or
              --force-confold is also been given, in which case it will
              use that to decide the final action.

> That is, will somethings break if the administrator removes a
> conffile, rather then nullify its contents or commenting in each
> line of the file?  The file is marked by dpkg as a conffile.

Whether something will break depends upon the programs involved.  For
example if you remove /etc/bind/named.conf then the named will
certainly be broken.  But other applications may be okay without a
conffile.  So the answer there is that it depends upon the
application whether you will break something by removing the file.

Bob

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