xorg.conf with manual config is moved away at upgrade

[Martin Stjernholm]

I need to configure a couple of options for the nvidia driver, e.g. Coolbits. For this I have /etc/X11/xorg.conf which contains purely my manual configuration. I have found that this file is being renamed xorg.conf.<MMDDYYYY> at irregular intervals, thereby disabling these manual settings.

/var/lib/dpkg/info/nvidia-prime.postrm is very likely what's causing this:

case "$1" in
    purge|remove|upgrade|failed-upgrade|abort-install|abort-upgrade|disappear)
        # Remove the xorg.conf
        if [ -f $xorg_conf ]; then
            mv $xorg_conf $xorg_conf.$now
        fi

Iiuc this is run on every upgrade of the nvidia-prime package. I don't know the reasons for doing this, but given that /etc/X11/xorg.conf is still intended (only) for manual configuration, it should not summarily be moved away. If there's a risk for conflicting old configs then they should be detected more accurately and handled through the normal tools that updates/replaces /etc files containing local changes.

[Alex Roman (alex-roman)]

This is happening to me on a regular basis as well, and is annoying. The nvidia driver doesn't recognize the DPI properly and so I am left with VERY LARGE TEXT, so it's easy to recognize when this happens. Every time I have to rename the file back to xorg.conf. I don't understand why packages are touching this file at all. It should be left to the user to configure their X. Especially since Ubuntu doesn't create this file by default, if the user put it there, leave it there.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package nvidia-prime - 0.8.4

---------------
nvidia-prime (0.8.4) yakkety; urgency=medium

  * debian/postrm.in:
    - Do not try to remove the old xorg.conf (LP: #1345585).

 -- Alberto Milone <email address hidden> Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:54:00 +0200