Prevent creation of conffiles

Question

I'm trying to build a package which has some files under /etc that are not configuration. They are included in the conffiles automatically even if I create an empty package.conffiles in the debian directory.

How can I stop dh_installdeb from doing that?

Answer 1

I’m not sure I understand rafl’s answer, but dh_installdeb as of debhelper=9.20120115ubuntu3 adds everything below /etc to conffiles nearly unconditionally: debian/conffiles adds conffiles but does not override them.

It’s possible to override manually in debian/rules. For example, in order to prevent any files from being registered as conffiles:

override_dh_installdeb:
    dh_installdeb
    find ${CURDIR}/debian/*/DEBIAN -name conffiles -delete

(of course, indentation must be hard tab)

Answer 2

It's possible to define a upgrade rule at preinst script in debian/<package-name>.preinst using dpkg-maintscript-helper.

#!/bin/sh
# preinst script for <package-name>

set -e

case "$1" in
    install|upgrade)
      if dpkg-maintscript-helper supports rm_conffile 2>/dev/null; then
        dpkg-maintscript-helper rm_conffile /etc/foo/conf.d/bar <Previous package version> -- "$@"
      fi
    ;;

    abort-upgrade)
    ;;

    *)
        echo "preinst called with unknown argument \`$1'" >&2
        exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

More info: The right way to remove an obsolete conffile in a Debian package