Hi all, in the past the use of debconf notes has been discussed, and it seemed to be general consensus that they are mostly useless (or misused), but that there are still a couple of legitimate uses which prevent their removal from debconf (or making them a no-op) [1]
Now I am at the point where I would like to introduce a new debconf note, and I'd like to request comments before we do that. We are dealing with the cleanup after bug #420390. Briefly, tetex-base's postrm was written under the assumption that teTeX is the only TeX system, and the postrm removes a lot of files below /etc which were installed by older versions of teTeX - but now with the appearance of texlive, these files are conffiles of texlive-* again. Some of these files are essential, texlive-base, texlive-base-bin, or texlive-latex-base won't configure without them. The postrm has been corrected now, but many people have already done the purge. To me, the solution is to resurrect these conffiles without prompting, because prompting doesn't make sense if the only working answer is "yes". Even if I know that "preserve local changes upon upgrade" normally means also to preserve conffile removals - I think this cannot be applied here. I'm also considering to resurrect the non-essential conffiles while on the way, either unconditionally or only when the essential ones were missing, too. Now the question is, how should we notify the user about what we've done? Since this is a violation of the letter of policy, I don't think a remark in NEWS.Debian is appropriate, and I'd like to use a debconf note of priority "high". But notes are considered deprecated. On the other hand, it's not an error, so the error type doesn't seem appropriate... Comments welcome, Frank [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.general/106537/ -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)