On Mon 13 Mar 2000, Santiago Vila wrote: > On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Paul Slootman wrote: > > > Also, when upgrading mime-support, it always offers to replace the > > conffile /etc/mailcap, which is NEVER a smart thing to do. Maybe > > /etc/mailcap should be one of the base files, and not part of > > mime-support? > > This is Bug #34294, which I reported more than a year ago and it has not > been fixed yet. > > Glad to know I'm not the only one to think this is a bug. I have tried to > convince the maintainer (Brian White) several times about the need to > change this, without much success. He says "/etc/mailcap almost never > changes" and he does not see the need to modify the way /etc/mailcap is > handled.
That's strange, as I've been asked whether to replace it on numerous occasions during upgrades to the current potato (every month or so). Maybe the conffile mechanism doesn't always work properly? Or was I confused... (it's been known to happen :-) Ans it still doesn't address the situation where packages are being configured but mime-support isn't yet. > If this is not a bug in mime-support, then lots of packages would be > violating policy because they modify /etc/printcap ("a configuration file You mean /etc/mailcap I hope > of another package") every time they register their MIME viewers... Well, if they do it with update-mime it should be OK (unless mime-support has been installed but not yet configured, that is). > Time to make a policy proposal? It would be something like: > "Do not ever use the conffile mechanism to initialize a database". Sounds reasonable. Anything that gets updated via an "update-foo" thingie shouldn't be a conffile, as it is NEVER useful to upgrade to the version in the newest package on an installed system. Paul Slootman -- home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wurtel.demon.nl/ work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.murphy.nl/ debian: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/ isdn4linux: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.isdn4linux.de/