Hello. I plan to make /etc/profile a "configuration file which is not a conffile but it's created by postinst instead", so that dpkg never asks about it, not even once every two years. The prototype is at
http://people.debian.org/~sanvila/base-files I've checked that upgrades work (they already worked for /etc/inputrc) and more important, that it does not break debootstrap, but if you know of any package that might break, please say so, or better fix it to work regardless of /etc/profile being a conffile or not. Nobody but the system admin should modify /etc/profile anyway, so I'm not going to feel responsible for making old bugs more visible. Thanks.