* It turns out that the people who told me that removing a conffile in the

  preinst was sufficient to have dpkg replace it without prompting when
  moving a conffile between packages were very much mistaken. As far as I
  can tell, the only way to do this reliably is to write out the desired
  new text of the conffile in the preinst. This is gross, and requires
  shipping the text of all conffiles in the preinst too, but there's
  nothing for it. Fortunately this nonsense is only required for smooth
  upgrades from sarge.

1 files changed, 26 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/debian/substitute-conffile.pl b/debian/substitute-conffile.pl
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..7dd23363e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/debian/substitute-conffile.pl
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+#! /usr/bin/perl -p
+
+# This is needed for a nasty preinst hack to work around a bug in sarge's
+# version of dpkg. It substitutes the literal text of conffiles into preinst
+# scripts so that they can be used when moving conffiles between packages.
+
+BEGIN {
+    %texts = ();
+    while (@ARGV > 1) {
+        my $name = $ARGV[0];
+        shift;
+        local *FILE;
+        open FILE, '<', $ARGV[0];
+        local $/ = undef;
+        my $text = <FILE>;
+        close FILE;
+        # Quote for the shell.
+        $text =~ s/'/'\\''/g;
+        shift;
+        $texts{$name} = $text;
+    }
+}
+
+for my $name (keys %texts) {
+    s/\@$name\@/'$texts{$name}'/g;
+}