Hi, mentors, I need help with the removal of obsolete conffiles in bash-completion. I think I understood what to do, but since I don't know how to reproduce the problem, I'm uncomfortable with the change. Below, I give a long description of the problem (feel free to skip it if it sounds trivial), then I ask the question itself.
* Description of the problem: Bug report #645439 [1] for bash-completion shows that some conffiles have been removed from the package, but never purged from users' systems (apart from the conffiles listed in the bug report, I found two other files). In order to learn about conffiles and what package maintainers need to do in their packages to properly handle them (deletion, updates, installation), I read the wiki about conffile handling in dpkg [2], as well as the documentation for dpkg-maintscript-helper [3], and dh_installdeb [4]. Finally, I read the relevant commits in the repository for the bash-completion package [5], to try and understand what has already been done regarding the removal of obsolete conffiles, and I found this particular commit [6], which adds debian/maintscript. Since bash-completion 2.0 (actually 1.90), the completion files where moved from /etc/bash_completion.d to /usr/share/bash-completion, which rendered a lot of conffiles obsolete. The commit above deals with these files, but only with the files that were present in the 1.3-x releases. Files that have been previously removed (such as those reported in debian bug report #645439 [1]) have never been dealt with, thus causing the bug. * Actual question: Now, I'm planning to add the remaining files (which I tracked down by examining the history of the repository) to maintscript, but I'm uncertain about the syntax. Initially, I thought I should add lines such as: rm_conffile /etc/bash_completion.d/harbour 1:1.1-1 for conffiles removed in bash-completion version 1:1.1-1. However, after reading the manpage for dh_installdeb [4] (more specifically, the section `package.maintscript', I changed my mind and added lines such as: rm_conffile /etc/bash_completion.d/harbour 1:2.8-5~ So... Is that the right thing to do? I.e. regardless of the version at which a conffile was removed, I should use the current release version in `rm_conffile' calls? The changes that I'm planning to do are implemented in a staging-area in the repository by some commits (one for each version that removed a conffile) [7,8,9,10]. (you are free to check them if that helps) Thank you very much for your patience in reading up until this point! :) Kind regards, Gabriel [1] https://bugs.debian.org/645439 [2] https://wiki.debian.org/DpkgConffileHandling [3] https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/dpkg/dpkg-maintscript-helper.1.en.html [4] https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/debhelper/dh_installdeb.1.en.html [5] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/tree/conffiles [6] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/0c22c4ac451d3195da4806728c6ed1163ab88008 [7] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/c9203c53ea75d6fe708bf2deb82f1341072a97db [8] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/e55d81a56ae89ee0b9cd3bc1e6fc683a33c17991 [9] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/7d413831f1a8ac1181f21efdae594fc8ac5ec0f3 [10] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bash-completion/commit/2c23594b23c00a663e396d185922e577881e7d16
