preventing known-damaging third-party to fedora/epel package upgrade?

[Peter Jones]

On 07/12/2012 12:13 PM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On 07/12/2012 11:41 AM, Paul Wouters wrote:
>> On 07/12/2012 11:38 AM, Peter Jones wrote:
>>
>>> So, this makes me wonder.  Is there a good reason rpm doesn't check the new
>>> package and the old package for having the same file during an upgrade, and
>>> simply use the flags on the incoming package if they're both present?
>>
>> What if the incoming package accidentally remove the "noreplace"? You
>> wouldn't want to wipe out the existing configs in that case either.
>>
>>> Is it just that we've never done it that way?
>>
>> I think usually these cases fall under "unsupported".
>
> I think the point is that if the newer package flags trump the old and
> broken old package, you can fix things a bit more sanely than the
> current state of affairs where the old package is missing flags.

For a bit more nuance, we could also say that if the old package has flags
indicating that saving the file is in some way important, make an rpmsave,
and otherwise use the new flags.

-- 
         Peter