Hi, This has already been discussed since forever; it is commonly called "volatile", "cruft" of "ghost" files, the 'ghost' name comes from the rpm world.
Some are not actually file but glob patterns that can match several files. I don't know if there are plan to add the needed support it to dpkg soon - if it was easy & evident it would had been a long time ago - but a another way to have "automagic" support without waiting for an expected change in dpkg is to use debhelper or some debhelper add-on that rely on machine-readable data that could be later on repurposed to be read by dpkg. There is dh-cruft, that I maintain... I can't really say I _wrote_ it because my perl is so bad. I use it extensively at work to register the ownership of each single file of the filesystem where we are severely constrained (embedded systems) I think debputy will be a better alternative in the long term and it's python code and worth checking out. Greetings (other piece of the puzzle: lintian-brush and the underlying tools which can be used to automate some kind of mass transition to a new packaging format) Le dim. 3 sept. 2023 à 19:49, David Bremner <da...@tethera.net> a écrit : > > > >From an IRC discussion Helmut asked me to mention our use case for > dynamic file registration. In emacs addon packages we currently generate > byte-compiled .elc files and some symlinks at install time. It would be > very useful not to have to track and clean those up in an ad-hoc way. >
