On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 07:59, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > Umm. apt allows you to determine reverse depends. From there > there is an easy hop to sending email to ask the develoeprsa in > question; or to exaimine a package to look at its conffiles.
This doesn't solve the problem of the dependent package being broken by the removal of the conffile upon which it has been depending. A _new_ version of the dependent package may have been released to the archive, but this is not the version that the victim has installed on his computer. Nick Phillips made a good point, however, when he said that conffiles are no different from other files in this respect. If bar depends on foo, then bar might be broken if _any_ file is removed from foo. Yet we do not do anything special when foo version 2.0 lacks an ordinary file that was contained in foo version 1.0. So we should not do anything special for conffiles either but (as Manoj Srivastava says) we should rely on communication among maintainers to avoid problems. Conffiles are different in one respect, which that is that they can be locally modified. When a conffile is to be overwritten and it has been modified, the user is asked for permission and the old version is backed up as *.dpkg-old. So when a conffile is to be deleted and it has been modified, the user should be asked for permission and the file renamed to *.dpkg-old (or *.dpkg-orphaned). Agree? -- Thomas
