Comment 2 for bug 1191028

Hmm. The general principle I'd like to follow here is that charm authors should be jolly careful about what they choose to write to the charm directory; and in *general* I think that is good advice, because there really will be an important conflict if a charm is upgraded to a new version that wants to write data to a file already in use, and we do need to flag that as we did here.

(aside: the unit should have reported an "error" agent-state in status, right? if so, you can ssh in, fix the conflicts, and then `juju resolved $UNIT` to start the agent up again. it's not ideal, but it's a way out of this situation suitable for a charm author; and it could be fairly argued that the charm author's job is to anticipate such issues and not release to users one that suffers from these problems)

Nonetheless, this behaviour is clearly obnoxious.