On Lu, 05 dec 11, 21:59:50, Pierre Frenkiel wrote: > On Mon, 5 Dec 2011, Andrei Popescu wrote: > > >You must be confusing this with the regular behavior. > > I can't confuse, as I am unable to guess, from the man, what is > the "regular behaviour", i.e. the default one. > Details are given for all --force-things, but I found nothing on what > happens to the conffiles in the absence of any --force-xxx > So, my view of the default behaviour is an experimental one. Assume you installed package foo version 1.0 and modified one of its files marked as a conffile[1]. On the next upgrades (say versions 1.1, 1.2) nothing changes in the *packaged* file, so dpkg will just upgrade the package without any prompts. [1] BTW, "conffile" and "configuration file" are not synonyms Now assume you eventually upgrade to 2.0, which brings major changes, including some changes to the *packaged* conffile. In this case dpkg can not decide by itself what to do and will ask the system administrator during the upgrade. This works good in most cases. Exceptions would be something like cups, which lets you modify a conffile through the web interface and then you get a conffile prompt. Hope this explains, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
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