On Mon 26 Nov 2018 at 22:08:07 -0500, Cindy-Sue Causey wrote: > On 11/26/18, David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > > On Mon 26 Nov 2018 at 16:31:38 (+0000), Bonno Bloksma wrote: > >> What I just DID notice is that the upgrade replaced ALL nanorc files in > >> the /usr/share/nano/ directory. All ca. 30 default files with timestamp > >> Jul 16 2014 are gone and my default.nanorc file of a later date is gone as > >> well. > >> There are now around 40 files with timestamp Jan 11 2017. > > > > AIUI those files are part of the nano package, so the upgrade upgrades > > them. It would be nice if one could substitute one's own foo.nanorc > > file in a location like /etc/nano/ but I don't think the code for that > > has been written into the program. > > > I suppose it would still wipe out a symlink that was hooked to > something under something like ~/.something. In a perfect world, it > would say, "Ewww, I don't know what that is," and keep moving without > touching it..
A non-package file is left untouched by a package upgrade. An admin could handle an edited package file with dpkg-divert. File diversions are a way of forcing dpkg(1) not to install a file into its location, but to a diverted location. Diversions can be used through the Debian package scripts to move a file away when it causes a conflict. System administrators can also use it to override some package's configuration file, or whenever some files (which aren't marked as “conffiles”) need to be preserved by dpkg, when installing a newer version of a package which contains those files. -- Brian.
