Comment 13 for bug 260443

Hi Dustin,

Dustin Kirkland [2008-09-18 17:03 -0000]:
> > - prerm: You should be able to drop this entirely; conffiles are
> automatically removed on purge
>
> Well, I thought it would be a good idea to remove the cronjob even on
> just a normal removal (in addition to a purge). Once the binary
> update-motd is gone, the cronjob is broken and is wasting cpu cycles
> and spewing error messages.

The error messages can be fixed by checking existence of the binary
first, or "|| true"ing it.

conffiles should not automatically be deleted on package removal at
least if they are modified. Since you are not checking this, I'd
suggest to rather leave conffile removal handling to dpkg, which will
ensure that it is conformant to policy, best practices, and what
admins are used to.

To be completely honest, the cronjob is already a waste of CPU cycles
in the default case (it will create the identical motds over and over
again every ten minutes). So I wouldn't worry too much about the
removed/not purged case.

> > - there should be a preinst which makes sure you don't get a dpkg
> > conffile conflict question on intra-intrepid upgrades, but don't worry
> > too much about it; developers should be able to figure that out.
>
> I talked to Colin about this, and he said not to worry about it

Full ack, I just wanted to mention it.