Bug#311188: debian-edu-config: Messes "programmatically" with conffiles of other packages

[Morten Werner Olsen <werner@skolelinux.no>]

On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 11:28:54AM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

> > (And yes, I believe we need to find a better way to handle
> > configuration in debian-edu, but while we wait, I see no better way to
> > do it than the current mechanism.  And I believe it is not breaking
> > policy as it is written in the Debian Policy Manual today.
> 
> It sure breaks packages' maintainance that their conffiles are altered
> by other packages (which I believe is the intend of D-P 10.7.4): It is
> expected to be able to remove functionality of a package by removing a
> package - that is not the case with debian-edu-config.

So do you also mean that it breaks packages' maintainance that their
conffiles are altered by the sysadmins too? Package maintainer script
shall perfectly handle that conffiles are changed by the sysadmin.

An extreme solution to this bug could have been to rewrite
debian-edu-config as a HUGE installation-manual, and tell the
sysadmins (I expect that there wouldn't be many left) to manually do
all the configuring. In the same way as it is now after a Debian-edu
installation, the maintainer scripts of the packages that will have a
altered configuration shall handle this during upgrade.

I'm not sure I see the difference. If I know the debian-edu-config
package right, one will have to run a script to change any conffiles
after manually installing the pacakge?


- Werner