[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#674460: initscripts: prompting due to modified conffiles which were not modified by the user

[Andreas Beckmann]

Hi Roger,

thanks for looking into this.
Prompting the user for some essential/required package converting a
config file to a conffile would probably annoy many users (and would
require bad workarounds for tools like piuparts ...).

On 2012-05-25 00:52, Roger Leigh wrote:
> So how best to avoid the prompt?  I guess in the preinst we
> could, if the md5sum matches one of the above 79 sums, we can
> replace it with the current version, moving it to .dpkg-old.
> Along with a suitable warning.
> 
> I'm not sure this case is really covered by the existing
> Dpkg conffile handling cases.

The "config file" to "conffile" case is not well supported by any tools
so far.
Probably this is something that could be done by dpkg-maintscript-helper
in the future once it is clear how to do it safely.
So if you come up with some generic maintainer script snippets other
maintainers probably would be thankful. Recently base-files wanted to
make /etc/profile a conffile (but reverted because of a missing solution
how to avoid prompting) and sudo does it as well (using exactly one
md5sum covering only upgrades from squeeze, nothing older).

If moving /etc/default/rcS to .dpkg-{old,bak,foo} in the preinst is not
safe unless a new one is installed immediately, a copy of the new
version will have to be embedded in the preinst script ... another
reason to generate that part of the maintainer script code+data ...

Andreas