On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 14:00, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > It does not belong in debconf. Put it in the changelog -- users who > > want to know what's changing on their system should be looking there > > anyway, and tools such as apt-listchanges make it easier and ever to > > access changelog information. > > This kind of thing would go in the hypothetical NEWS.Debian, but > unfortunately I haven't gotten around to implementing support for it in > apt-listchanges yet.
Having just implemented support for NEWS.Debian in apt-listchanges (see 192089), and being generally against debconf notes, I disagree that in this case debconf should be avoided. This is not news; it requires changes from the system administrator. Joey Hess has mentioned, and I agree (see 199722), that debconf notes should really be named (and should always be interpreted as) warnings. One example we discussed during Debconf 2 was that of database software which, because of a format switch, requires a dump and re-load. In that case a warning is all you can provide, as there is no way to automatically find and convert all databases on a machine. This is a similar situation. There is, by the admission of the maintainer, no good way to convert between the 'old way' of running stunnel and the new way. Should this truly be the case, debconf should be used to warn the admin that stunnel will need configuration changes before it will function. Now, I agree that there should be some method of not breaking the configuration. But, if there truly is no way to avoid breakage, Debconf is the correct method of informing the administrator of this fact.