[pkg-ntp-maintainers] Bug#370332: Bug#370332: dear maintainer, please comment...

[Peter Eisentraut]

Holger Levsen wrote:
> could you please comment on the status of this bug? It's really important
> for us to fix #311188 for Lenny, so that upgrades from Lenny to Lenny+1
> will work without problems for Debian Edu installations.
>
> It seemed that you "just" needed to change a few bits in the packaging and
> then upload... any plans for doing so? ;-)

I think the approach being proposed is wrong.  It would upset existing users 
and make life more complicated for "normal" uses, to accomodate what is 
essentially a packaging and policy problem.  There could be any number of 
custom Debian distributions that want to customize various configuration 
files.  The end result of that would be that the dpkg conffile mechanism must 
go away entirely.  Maybe that is the way to go, I wouldn't be opposed to 
that.  But we need to consider this a bit more generally before we craft an 
individual workaround in every package.

That said, I would welcome a proposal and patch for switching to ucf.  AFAICT, 
this would give end users essentially the same behavior while allowing other 
packages to write around in the configuration files.  I have never 
implemented it, however.