You have to use sarge dpkg while updating ssh, since the etch dpkg suffixes the conffile fields with " obsolete" when they're no longer owned by a package. Then, packages including that pathname automatically take over the files. But, I don't know if anything guarantees that etch dpkg will be both installed and re-execed by apt before updating ssh, so IMO packages should upgrade silently WRT conffiles from sarge to etch. Etch+1 will need much less conffile foo, for for this situation.
Justin
