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Re: What happens when you upgrade a package with modified config files?



On Wednesday 23 January 2013 16:58:52 Karl E. Jorgensen wrote:
> > But I cannot push this further all by myself.
> 
> Poke the individual Debian maintainers - they're smart people :-)

They are also busy people. They will be more likely to move if *their* users 
are complaining ;-) , or even better, helping.

> > [1] http://wiki.debian.org/PackageConfigUpgrade
> 
> Yes - unfortunately the formats of configuration files vary (wildly)
> between different software packages, so I doubt that a
> one-size-fits-all solution is viable.  Perhaps Config::Model should
> use a plugin-structure for different config file formats? 

It's already a pluging structure: to support foobar style format, you'd have 
to write a Config::Model::Backend::FooBar class. See for instance the OpenSsh 
backend [1]

> I've seen other debian packages migrate config files (cannot remember
> which ones off the top of my head), and in those cases the
> installation explicitly asked for permission to rewrite the config
> file [1].

I think that could be arranged either in the postinst snippet injected by 
dh_config_model_upgrade or by a specific cme option (or both).

> This still leaves the problem with non-trivial upgrades, e.g. where
> nearly everything has been refactored between versions, and no
> sensible defaults are possible for (some) configuration variables in
> the new version.  So a 100% automatic migration is probably not
> possible. 99% may be possible though. It depends.

Agreed.

All the best

[1] https://github.com/dod38fr/config-model-
openssh/tree/master/lib/Config/Model/Backend
-- 
 https://github.com/dod38fr/   -o- http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/
http://ddumont.wordpress.com/  -o-   irc: dod at irc.debian.org


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