It is annoying that every program has its own scheme for naming backup files. This becomes a problem when we want to use utilities such as run-parts and update-modules which need to ignore backup files in given directories: each one has to know that it should ignore .* files, ~* files, #*# files, .dpkg-* files, etc. There is currently no consistency in what is ignored. Run-parts demands that filenames have only "letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens" while update-modules ignores only .dpkg-* and *~. (It also ignores .* but this is not mentioned on the man page.)
I wonder if Debian should adopt some policy about this. One idea is to require that backup files follow a certain specified format, e.g., foo.bar -> .foo.bar~ Another idea is to have update-modules, apmd_proxy, devfsd and other programs that use all files in a directory impose the strict requirements of run-parts: that the file contain only letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens. That automatically excludes all the backup files that I can think of. On my system there is only one file that violates those requirements, namely, /etc/modutiles/ipx.aliases from the ipx package. -- Thomas Hood
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