[Soc-coordination] Week 4: New Release Work

[Dominique Dumont]

On Friday 20 June 2014 18:52:57 Ian Donnelly wrote:
> Also, it has
> become clear that the best way to continue with my GSoC project will
> require patching dpkg to attempt a merge on conffiles before prompting the
> user of how to deal with conflicts. I will be looking more into that next
> week.

Technically, you're right. But you may have problems with the debian policy. 
Section "Configuration file handling" [1] mentions that  "If both [conffiles] 
have changed their version the user is prompted about the problem and must 
resolve the differences themselves." People may interpret that as "dpkg must 
not change the content of conffile"

I remember I got some push-back when I submitted the idea of managing 
configuration upgrade with config-model. For lcdproc, I ended moving the 
upgraded file from /etc/LCDd.conf to /usr/share/doc and creating 
/etc/LCDd.conf from scratch with cme.

Before spending time patching dpkg, I strongly suggest that you check on 
debian-devel that the functionality brought by your patches are acceptable.

HTH

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ap-pkg-conffiles.html