Bug#762364: gnome-panel-data: doesn't clean up old config file :

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

Control: reopen -1

On 26/09/14 13:07, Dmitry Shachnev wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Control: close -1
> 
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Christoph Anton Mitterer
> <calestyo at scientia.net> wrote:
>> Even if that's a long while ago, why does it mean that it can't be
>> cleaned up anymore?
> 
> Yes. We keep transitional stuff only for one Debian release.
> 
>> I mean it happens every now and then that maintainers forget to properly
>> handle old config files, which they do then in on of the next releases -
>> what's the difference if there is two weeks in between or 4 years?
>> There should be dh helper routines to mark such file obsolete, and if
>> its there it's removed and if not nothing happens.
>>
>> Otherwise all people who ever had gnome-panel-data installed will live
>> with stale:
>> /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.gnome.ClockApplet.Mechanism.conf
>> /etc/dbus-1/system.d/
>> /etc/dbus-1/
> 
> I checked Svn and found out that on Debian side that directory was
> dropped in revision 27005. That probably means that you had that
> configuration file modified, and thus it was not removed. (Also, apt
> should have warned you in any case, about "not removing directory
> /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ which has modified files").
> 
> There is really nothing I can do *now* to remove that file from your system.

There's dpkg-maintscript-helper's rm_conffile. That won't help in cases where
the user has *already* removed the package, but for those that still have it, it
will work, and is the right thing to do. So we should do it.

You can find examples of this in other GNOME packages, e.g.
gnome-settings-daemon. In many cases, this was only noticed after the file had
been removed, but that doesn't mean we can't fix it after the fact, as Christoph
suggests.

Regards,
Emilio