better package management

[Luke Yelavich]

On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 02:42:06AM EST, Kyle wrote:
> I believe these are files that are created during/after installation
> that are not actually part of the package. So far as I know, there is no
> package manager that can track files that are created after a package
> has been installed on the system, and this is generally undesirable.
> Removing such files using the package manager would be similar to
> removing /var/www after Apache is removed. You would lose all your
> website documents even if migrating to nginx for example. Hope this
> helps explain the situation.

Apt/dpkg is flexible enough to allow the removal of any extra created files at package removal time if the package maintainer wishes it. Apt has a purge command that will remove the package and all its config files. The package maintainer can then write a post removal script that checks to see if the purge command was given, and if so, remove whatever other files that the package created.

Luke