Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek) [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek)

Posted Jan 15, 2007 18:00 UTC (Mon) by Azazel (subscriber, #3724)
In reply to: Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek) by drag
Parent article: Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to (and in Some Ways Above) Microsoft's Vista Challenge (eWeek)

> So I am supposing that when Apt-get asks (paraphrasing) 'Do you want to
> overwrite this configuration with the maintainer's version?' it will
> default to 'yes' and overwrite the configuration file.

Not true. "--yes" only works for certain classes of question. From the man-page:

> -y, --yes, --assume-yes
>
> Automatic yes to prompts; assume "yes" as answer to all prompts and run
> non-interactively. If an undesirable situation, such as changing a held
> package, trying to install a unauthenticated package or removing an
> essential package occurs then apt-get will abort.
> Configuration Item: APT::Get::Assume-Yes.

Overwriting locally modified config-files is another of these situations. The default action is to keep the locally modified version, and dpkg will fail with an error, rather than assuming yes.