[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#953997: obsolete conffiles after upgrade

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

On Sat, 2023-05-13 at 12:09 +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> However, I'm afraid we might have missed our chance.
> 
> At this point, nobody is going to be upgrading from 5.6.0-3, but from
> a more recent version of libvirt-daemon-system where the conffiles in
> question are already not considered part of the package.

As said in my message #10 in this bug,... I don't think it's necessary
that the conffiles are cleaned up exactly the version after they have
been dropped.

AFAIU, you'd simply replace the rm_conffile with a version right before
that of the next upload.

E.g. currently we have 9.0.0-3 in sid.

If your next upload were 9.0.0-4, you'd have to use 9.0.0-4~ (note the
tilde) in rm_conffile.


At least that's how I understand the manpage.


> Note that these conffiles are not actually gone, they've just been
> migrated to the libvirt-daemon-system-sysv. So we can't simply delete
> them from the system without a version check, otherwise we'd break
> all sysvinit users.
> 
> I can't think of a simple, reliable way to handle cleaning up under
> our current circumstances.

I guess Michael (the original reporter) is considerably more
knowledgable than myself and has done such moves previously in systemd
packages... so he may tell you way better about the proper way to
handle that.

But blindly I'd assume, one would do something like:
- cp -a the file that is still considered a conffile for
  libvirt-daemon-system (despite being actually considered as part of
  libvirt-daemon-system-sysv) to some safe mktemp location
- do the rm_conffile <priorversion> libvirt-daemon-system
- mv the file back to the old location

Then it should no longer be a conffile for libvirt-daemon-system,
should still be identical (with any possible set
XATTRs/ACLs/whatsoever) and you could from then on consider it as
belonging to libvirt-daemon-system-sysv.


The only thing I'm not sure about:
You still want the files to be conffiles (just in another package)...
with rm_conffile you can specify the package,... not sure if dpkg is
smart enough to keep the file as is (and you could just skip the whole
copying stuff) if it sees that the file is a conffile for another
package.

@Michael? What's the expert saying? :-)


Cheers,
Chris.