On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 09:14:11AM -0500, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote: > On Tue, 16 Dec 2014, Santiago Vila wrote: > >My objection is that policy says that the conffile mechanism is only > >appropriate for files having a default that may work for everybody, > >and the rationale is that if most people need to modify it, then most > >people will get prompted on upgrades over and over again. > > The package has to ship some kind of default or the server will not start. > As you say there isn't a default which will satisfy everyone so we expect it > to be changed by many users. But with normal operation of dpkg, new > versions of the package will silently overwrite the changes. The only way > to prevent this is to make it a conffile.
The only way? That's simply *not* true! It is perfectly allowed *not* to ship a configuration file inside the .deb and instead create it in the postinst, only if it does not exist. Please see /var/lib/dpkg/info/base-files.postinst for examples, where the "install_from_default" shell function is used to create files from the defaults, only the very first time the package is installed. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org