[Piuparts-devel] cleaning up obsolete conffiles after stretch -> buster upgrades of OpenStack packages

[Andreas Beckmann]

Dear OpenStack Maintainers,

your packages are responsible for a large fraction of "obsolete
conffiles" reported by piuparts after stretch -> buster upgrades:

https://piuparts.debian.org/stretch2buster/obsolete_conffiles_issue.html

Search in the logfiles for "OBSOLETE CONFFILE".

I don't have time to file individual bugs ... but the fix is usually easy:

Add to debian/{package}.maintscript the following line for each conffile
that is to be removed (substitute the placeholders, don't add quoting):

    rm_conffile {conffile} {fixing_version}~

Note that {fixing_version} is the version that you are going to upload
with this change, it is *not* the version that initially dropped the
conffile. Also note that there is a trailing '~' after the version.
That way the cleanup of the obsolete file(s) will work on upgrading from
any version that shipped the file even if the package was inbetween
upgraded (multiple times) to a version that no longer shipped the file,
but did not clean it up properly. It will also to the right thing after
binNMUs or backports.

There is no action needed for obsolete conffiles annotated with "OWNER
CHANGED TO".

You should also check
https://piuparts.debian.org/oldstable22testing/obsolete_conffiles_issue.html
because there may be even more obsolete conffile being left after the
upgrade path jessie -> stretch -> buster.

Since you already have some packages in experimental, too, you may want
to check these as well:
https://piuparts.debian.org/sid2experimental/obsolete_conffiles_issue.html

Don't hestate to ask me if you have further questions or are unsure
about certain cases.


Thanks,

Andreas

PS: you could start with src:pastescript and properly adopt it for the
team by updating the maintainer and closing #740531 while fixing the
obsolete conffile /etc/bash_completion.d/paster in python-pastescript