On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 08:58:54PM +0200, Jeffrey Ratcliffe wrote: > Fine. Although it always annoyed me that my $HOME filled up with > spurious dotfiles whose origin I'm not necessarily sure of, and that a > good installer could know to remove them if the package were purged.
It's important to distinguish between system and user, and the administrator of a machine isn't always the sole user. If a package is purged from the system it can deal with all the files it installed or generated because they aren't needed anymore. User configuration however isn't tied to the system. The user may have imported the configuration from some other machine, or intend to use the configuration elsewhere. The usefulness of user configuration is therefore not tied to the installed state of the package on this system. Until we have multi user mind reading hardware tied into dpkg, the only right thing is to never remove a user's files. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]