[Pkg-mailman-hackers] What to remove on purge

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 07:57:12AM +0200, Joost van Baal wrote:
> On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 05:55:54PM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:

>> I've just fixed mailman to be able to be cleanly purged again on a
>> default install, but wondered the following: mailman currently does
>> not purge cleanly if you have mailinglists and/or archives.

>> To me it would make sense to just rm -rf /var/lib/mailman on
>> purge. The user has said (s)he doesn't want mailman anymore, so
>> keeping any lists or archives does not seem useful or expected to
>> me. If the user wanted to keep such stuff (s)he would have just
>> removed the package.

> > What do you think? rm -rf /var/lib/mailman on purge or not?

> rm -rf sounds sane to me.

I disagree. Archives are in mbox format, so may be useful to transfer
archives to another archiving system (e.g. when switching a list to
another list manager). I always saw "purge" as "remove all
configuration settings for that package", not "remove all data created
/ used by this package".

But an _optional_ "rm -rf /var/lib/mailman", after we asked the user
whether he wants that, makes sense. It's what lpd does, so I see it as
the traditional answer to that question: ask the user!

Is debconf essential? In other words, can we use it in a postrm?

-- 
Lionel