[maemo-developers] Subtle difference in behavior of installation packages

[From: gregor herrmann]

On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:38:53 -0500, John Pietrzak wrote:

> >>apt-get remove without --purge won't remove conffiles, which would
> >>explain why /etc/sudoers.d/foo is still there ...
> >>And that's on purpose at least in Debian.
> BTW, what is Debian's purpose on keeping conffiles around?  Is there
> value in having config info for nonexisting packages?  (Should I not
> be worried about leaving sudoers files in the sudoers.d directory?)

A package might be removed only temporarily or in error, and be
reinstalled again later. In that case the admin will be happy to find
their carefully tweaked config files instead of having to re-create
them from scratch (or grab them from a backup or an older git
revision).
And in general conffiles lying around in /etc/ don't hurt.
 

Cheers,
gregor

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