Hi, On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 07:31:03PM +0000, Dmitry Bogatov wrote: [...] > Yes. Help is definitely needed. I guess, order of actions is following: > > * you upload util-linux=<no-hwclock> version and breaks with current > version of initscripts
Not sure, I'll have to think on, what the right relation is here. Normally you'd make the old carrier Depends: on the new version of the new carrying package, but that's something we likely want to avoid here. As you suggested Breaks might thus be the correct choice. The (new) util-linux package should likely also include some rm_conffile maintainerscripts to make sure the util-linux version of the conffiles don't linger as unowned files on systems that don't have initscripts installed. I'm not sure how to avoid util-linux removing the conffiles when/if they get taken over by initscripts though (hopefully it 'just works', but definitely needs to be investigated to make sure). > * I include files into initscripts and upload initscripts=<hwclock> and > conflict with util-linux << <no-hwclock>. The (new) initscripts package should definitely have: Replaces: util-linux << <new-revision>~ Breaks: util-linux << <new-revision>~ (Replaces is needed for overwriting files from another package on upgrade and Replaces also always goes hand in hand with either of Breaks (normally), Conflicts or a (versioned) Depends.) > > This is how things usually done on non-conffiles. Are there additional > complications with conffiles? Yes, there are many gotchas with conffiles. Extensive testing is needed. I'd say the two main things to test is that there are no confusion with unmodified files and also that local modifications (incl. removed files staying removed) are properly transfered on upgrade. Special care then also needs to persist until after Bullseye release with further changes to avoid breaking any of the previous before everyone has upgraded. (Fortunately skipping releases aren't supported on Debian, but for the benefit of potential downstream distros you might want to ensure this for a longer time and hold back on modifications that might break the upgrade/handover of the conffiles.) Regards, Andreas Henriksson
