Hello, these days, I found a package in Debian (four-digit popcon count) that in an upgrade happily removed some some changes I had made to a configuration file of that package, in /etc/.
My immediate reaction was to consider this a gross violation of the Debian Policy (10.7.3 "Behaviour"). Upon closer inspection however I found there are markers in that file that define a "managed section", an area where the upgrade process wants to do things - local modification ought to be placed outside of that, they will not be harmed, then. FWIW, this functionality was implemented upstream. So I'm a bit undecided here how to proceed: Either we understand the policy literally - then the maintainer will see an RC bug that will require some work to fix. Or we adopt a pragmatic approach since an administrator still can modify that file without losing these changes, although not in every place. It ought to be possible to revert any of the lines in the managed section if they are undesired. The administrator will however have to respect the markers, though. To be honest, I failed to see them, which alone might be reason to prefer the first, strict approach. Thoughts?
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature