> A package owns its custom directories (/etc/foo), and could delete it > *if it is empty* (although I think dpkg ought to do this, but I'm not > sure if does). If it's not empty, then it shouldn't delete it, because of: > > A package should never ever erase any other files.
Hrmm -- the only problem I see what that is -- let's take apt as an example. You get apt and it creates /etc/apt, and stores sources.list in it. Now I go in with vim and change sources.list. vim has that annoying (although occasionally helpful) habit of making those *~ files whenever a file you've edited with it has been changed. So when I go and --purge apt (like that'll ever happen), I'll end up with /etc/apt directory still, because dpkg won't remove that *~ file, no? -- While I mostly agree with your statements in the rest of the email, instances such as that can build up cruft on your system, and I, for one, extremely dislike cruft (perhaps due to running a 50M game + dos + win3.11 on a 100M hard drive for as long as I did). Manually getting rid of those *~'s isn't really an answer, either. I think a package should have the right to rm -r any directory that's not used by another package, empty or not. - Brian E. Ermovick (who currently has 15 *~'s on his system)
