I have finally figured out how to remove the items with no owners from the debconf database.
It took the fancy Makefile below, created by reverse engineering the extremely complicated debconf system as far as I was able. The big problem is that it is an extreme mystery how to do just # debconf-whatever --purge whatever If anybody knows the answer, please say it. Anyway, here's the Makefile purge:/tmp/base_purge bad_owners set -xe; for i in `cat bad_owners`; do j=/tmp/$$i.postrm; ln $< $$j;\ $$j; done bad_owners:owners good_owners comm -3 $? > $@ owners:/var/cache/debconf/config.dat debconf-show --listowners|sort -u > $@ good_owners:owners dpkg -l $$(cat $?)|perl -alnwe 'print $$F[1] if /^.[ic]/' > $@ /tmp/base_purge: echo . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule \&\& db_purge > $@ && chmod +x $@ By the way, just for the record below are the offending packages that left their configurations upon purge. I do not know if their current versions do the same. Nor do I know if piuparts detects such things. abiword-common alsa-base alsa-modules-2.4.18-k7 alsa-modules-2.4.19-k7 ash cpufreqd docbook-dsssl dpkg-www efax ftpd gnus htdig jpilot kdrill language-env libdvdread3 libpaper-utils libpaperg libpq3 libsensors3 links-ssl linux-image-2.6.16-1-686 php5-gd php5-mysql postgresql-client spamassassin ssh tetex-base tetex-bin txt2pdbdoc x86info xfree86-common xplanet -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org