Comment 14 for bug 576255

Agreed on all points.

I suggest you read the dpkg bug report. To summarize, I'm suggesting that conffile changes be listed and the user offered a chance to resolve them as if the upstream confffiles were changed in the new release, but only when maintainer scripts fail.

This is purely a selfish interest, as I see a lot of bug reports to handle related to maintainer scripts failing because the service is somewhat broken (possibly unbeknownst to the user) at upgrade time.