On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 09:21:33AM -0700, Keegan Quinn wrote: > On Monday 12 May 2003 04:40 pm, Brian May wrote: > > Also, just blindly purging packages can be dangerous, in some cases old > > packages will purge files used by newer packages that are still used by > > the system. > > I'm pretty sure that would be a bug. You should report this behavior if you > see it. Although I won't deny this happens, purging completely unused > packages is generally a good idea, unless you want your system building up a > nice history of everything it has ever been used for.
However, there is no good solution. eg. assume package a and a-beta conflict. Package a postinst creates a /etc/a.conf file. ie. a configuration file, not a conffile. Naturally the purge has to remove it. However, the system adminstrator installs package a-beta instead. This removes package a (because of the conflict) but doesn't run the purge script. Years latter, adminstrator say "I can purge package a". He does so. Package a-beta stops working. Reason: when purging package a, the postinst script has no way of knowing that /etc/a.conf is still being used by package a-beta, and erases it. The only solution I think is if dpkg were to take over responsibility for deleting configuration files, so that the postrm script doesn't have to worry. (I am assuming no package called a actually exists...) -- Brian May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
