Comment 15 for bug 1870314

It's a complicated situation, but I'll try to highlight some of the reasons.

First, there is the complexity of existing files. We will only copy the file if no file already exists because it may exist from the previous, python guest which automatically generated this file. There are also the .template and .distro files which may exist, but which we never ship, so which will never be package owned.

Now, we want to support only ever having the user create or edit this file (rather than generating it), so we will never attempt to modify the file again after the first install case. So there is no value in marking it as a config file. Also, since we support many distributions and not all distributions support such upgrade paths with user-editable files, we can't perform such upgrades even if we wanted to.

I think it's somewhat normal to have unowned files for certain cases like this. I found modern 20.04 image has 7 unowned files in /etc/default already. However, if you really think it's against Ubuntu policy to do this, we would prefer the Ubuntu variance be to not copy the file at all. The code is written with defaults built in, the file does not even need to exist. We copy it purely for customer convenience.