[Mageia-dev] Proposal: Updating released versions (long post)

[Renaud MICHEL]

On samedi 09 octobre 2010 at 05:45, andré wrote :
> Note that configuration files that have been changed from the 
> installation default are often already saved.  (Generally ".old" is 
> appended to the configuration file name, sometimes ".new" to the new 
> configuration file.)

But here you are only talking about system-wide configuration files, which 
are known of rpm as they are part of the package and marked as config files.
But what about user specific configuration files?
For the easy kind, where a program will have a single configuration file (or 
dedicated directory), a pre-inst script could find it in the home of each 
users and backup them. But you have cases of programs which have 
configuration scattered in multiple shared directories (like KDE), or even 
non-deterministic configuration files and it can become very tricky to find 
all the files to backup.
And you have the really hard kind, where the same configuration file may be 
shared by different packages. For example, plasma applet configurations are 
stored in a few ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma* files.

-- 
Renaud Michel