Tim Abbott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > We also ran into a few packages which will overwrite configuration files > that they manage via debconf, overwriting our symlink every time the > relevant package is upgraded. But I think that's a bug in those Debian > packages, since the same problem would occur for any manual changes to > those configuration files as well (I think in the cases I've seen it is > a failure to check whether an upgrade is occuring when generating the > configuration file in postinst).
Configuration files generated by debconf may not be manually changed without running this risk, including by humans. Generally, this is documented in the file. I have several of those in packages I maintain. This is a pretty widely accepted way of dealing with configuration files, and the right way to modify those files is with debconf pre-seeding rather than by trying to overwrite the file, IMO. I don't agree that this is a bug in the package in the general case, although there may be packages that are more aggressive about overwriting than need to be. > What other problems have you experienced? I've seen the diverted configuration file disappear, making it impossible to undo the diversion, and never did track down why that happened. I haven't run into any problems in cases where the diversion is never dropped, though. (But renaming the package that manages the diversions is something that dpkg-divert doesn't deal with at all well.) We're using Puppet to handle this instead of Debian packages, and I'm much happier with that solution. I wouldn't recommend doing what you're doing, but of course you may have improved the tools sufficiently that it's a good idea. :) Also, I know that most of the alternatives involve some central management system, and there are a lot of use cases that don't allow for that. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]