Hello. (I just subscribed; apologies if this subject has come up recently. The archive search at www.debian.org did not know anything about "conffiles", though).
The short story: How do I tell dpkg to re-install the conffiles in a package, overwriting any changes I've made myself? The long story: The other day I upgaded to hamm. Everything went along smoothly, only I lost the changes I'd made to /etc/terminfo/l/linux so the line-drawing characters (dialog and friends) would work with a latin1 font. This was on purpose; I had saved a backp of my old terminfo entry so I could hack it up once again after the upgrade. Unfortunately I failed to hack it up properly, and ncurses-based applications began doing rather strange things to the display. No big deal, I thought, we can just pull back pull back the original terminfo from ncurses-base_blahblah.deb and being more careful with the hacking the next time. Which turned out to be easier said than done. Trouble is, ncurses-base declares /etc/terminfo/l/linux as a conffile, which makes dpkg think that any changes I make to it - even removing it - are on purpose and not anything I would ever want to reconsider until a new version of the package appears with a changed original file. I could not find any switches to tell dpkg that I *want* to lose my changes to this or that conffile, so eventually I ended up purging the whole package (use the --force!) and installing it anew. Surely that cannot be the only way to deal with such a situation? What have I missed - apart from backing up the file in question before hacking on it, but the original *was* there on the cdrom, right? -- Henning Makholm http://www.diku.dk/students/makholm
