Frank Küster writes ("Re: mucking with dpkg control files in maintainer
scripts?"):
> I think the main reason why this is not being done is that there's a
> general fear that calling "dpkg -s" from a script that has been called
> by dpkg might give unpredictable, or at least not the desired results.
If you need this information, dpkg -s is a better way to get it than
messing around with /var/lib/dpkg - but see my earlier message.
Messing with conffiles is _very complicated_ and doing so by hand in
maintscripts is likely to produce more subtle and complicated bugs
rather than fewer bugs.
> If it were documented how dpkg behaves under such circumstances (same
> for "dpkg -l"), people might be willing to change this.
Where is this documentation you refer to ? dpkg -s and dpkg -l are
equally reliable in this respect.
Ian.
