> 3) Impatient but advanced user > Somebody who dislikes being asked repeatedly whether or not a > conffile can be overwritten. This user has tested xserver-xfree86's > debconf interface, and has taken the time to understand how > xserver-xfree86's postinst generates the configuration file based on > the debconf information. He is very confident in it doing the right > thing, and doesn't want to be bothered on each upgrade about whether > or not it can overwrite it. More importantly, this user knows full > well that, in the very rare circumstance where it *does* break, he > can easily fix it within minutes. > > This user will likely feel the same way about almost all > debconf/postinst-managed configuration files, excepting the few which he > knows will break repeatedly. He doesn't want to get asked 50 "may I > overwrite your file?" questions each upgrade. He knows that in the time > spent reading and answering all those questions, he could just has > easily fixed the two cases of breakage. Which he would have to do in > addition to answering the questions, were they forced upon him.
This also comes down to another matter, where a package upgrade may run an external program for generating configfiles. It would be nice if this could also be handled with a "don't reconfig" flag. Ex. A while ago, although I believe this bug is fixed now, any upgrade to XFree would automatically (!!) regenerate my XF86Config-4 file. Unfortunatly, it would set the DefaultDepth to 24, which disables direct rendering on my Voodoo3 machine. It was quite irritating with unstable when occasionally OpenGL would just stop working and I would have to go and manually reset DefaultDepth to 16. Whilst this isn't happening anymore, I have seen other packaes do similar things to deal with per-version configfile format changes, etc. - Ender
