Comment 13 for bug 1870314

Is there a particular reason for not wanting to mark this configuration file as a configuration file? UCF_FORCE_CONFFOLD and UCF_FORCE_CONFFMISS provide the exact behaviour you described and if used only in non interactive mode the users would even have a chance to review changes.
Without marking the file as a config file the file is not associated with the package and this is usually considered confusing.