John, Would it be possible to add the base-files package version to the header comment of all the scripts in base-files? It would then be apparent which version of the base-files package each script came from.
Another thing that was talked about was checking whether /etc/profile was edited and updating it if it wasn't (same probably goes for other /etc/defaults scripts). One way to do this is to compare /etc/profile with /etc/defaults/etc/profile in the preremove script, and if it's the same, remove /etc/profile, i.e., if /bin/cmp -s /etc/defaults/etc/profile /etc/profile; then echo "/etc/profile was modified, leaving as-is" elif [ $? -eq 127 ]; then echo "diffutils must have been uninstalled, sorry" else /bin/rm /etc/profile fi The contortions above are needed to correctly handle the case when "diffutils" is being upgraded as well. Of course, upgrading "fileutils" will cause "rm" to fail, and no postinstall script will work if either "cygwin" or "bash" is upgraded, but at least the above won't remove /etc/profile if /bin/cmp is missing (as the first obvious choice, if ! /bin/cmp -s /etc/defaults/etc/profile /etc/profile; then /bin/rm /etc/profile fi would have). BTW, a question to setup developers: did we ever figure out how to get preremove scripts to run reliably? Igor -- http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/ |\ _,,,---,,_ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ [EMAIL PROTECTED] |,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D. '---''(_/--' `-'\_) fL a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-. Meow! "I have since come to realize that being between your mentor and his route to the bathroom is a major career booster." -- Patrick Naughton