On Mon, Aug 10, 2026 at 06:37:03AM +0200, Daniel Baumann wrote:
I presume you selected 'keep modifications', which means the file wasn't updated and instead, you should see a /etc/dokuwiki/dokuwiki.php.dpkg-new or something like that.
I concur, a classic user error.
Normally, we could just mark dokuwiki.php not being a conffile (all files in /etc automatically have the status of a conffile, unless dpkg is told otherwise; any other file outside of /etc is not a conffile by default). However, that would mean, that any local modifications are automatically discarded on upgrade, i.e. users loose their settings.
I think that would be a policy violation and also a bad example.
Of course, it's a bad idea to change dokuwiki.php in the first place, all changes should go to local.php. However, users sometimes don't do that.
How strong is the wording pointing people to local.php inside dokuwiki.php? Maybe that could be improved.
* keep dokuwiki.php a conffile for now
Yes.
* add a check in postinst so that after the package is installed (i.e. after the user has chosen to keep the old dokuwiki.php) we show a debconf warning message if the syntax option is missing and that that needs to be added, and advise the user to use local.php for modifications instead of dokuwiki.php.
Please don't. That's going to explode in the face of all package maintainers wo will spend weeks of their lifetime writing manual checks for each and every incompatible change in packages during upgrades.
and/or we could simply add the syntax option if it's missing.
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