Package: dpkg Version: 1.4.1.18 Severity: wishlist New dpkg proposes to show conffile diffs, which I find is a nice feature. However, it only shows the diffs between the current settings (conffile) and new version (conffile.dpkg-new).
When possible (ie. conffile.dpkg-dist exists), I find that 2 diffs, one between conffile.dpkg-dist and conffile, and the other between conffile.dpkg-dist and conffile.dpkg-new, would be more useful. That is you will be able to look at your own changes, and at the maintainer's changes. As an example, when recently dealing with gdm.conf upgrade, I was able to do: # diff conffile.dpkg-dist conffile.dpkg-new >conffile.diff # patch conffile <conffile.diff (obviously, I tried "patch --dry-run" first ;) This would advocate a copy of conffile to conffile.dpkg-dist on install, so that the conffile mechanism can work at its best without relying on the sysadmin to manually create the copy before editing a conffile (which I try to always do myself, but happen to forget). -- System Information Debian Release: potato Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux bylbo 2.2.12 #1 Tue Oct 26 22:59:19 CEST 1999 i586 Versions of packages dpkg depends on: ii libc6 2.1.2-6 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an ii libncurses4 4.2-3.4 Shared libraries for terminal hand ii libstdc++2.10 1:2.95.2-1 The GNU stdc++ library
