(debian-policy.info)Configuration file handling from old Packaging Manual

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17 Configuration file handling (from old Packaging Manual)
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‘dpkg’ can do a certain amount of automatic handling of package
configuration files.

Whether this mechanism is appropriate depends on a number of factors,
but basically there are two approaches to any particular configuration
file.

The easy method is to ship a best-effort configuration in the package,
and use ‘dpkg’’s conffile mechanism to handle updates.  If the user is
unlikely to want to edit the file, but you need them to be able to
without losing their changes, and a new package with a changed version
of the file is only released infrequently, this is a good approach.

The hard method is to build the configuration file from scratch in the
‘postinst’ script, and to take the responsibility for fixing any
mistakes made in earlier versions of the package automatically.  This
will be appropriate if the file is likely to need to be different on
each system.

Automatic handling of configuration files by dpkg

Fully-featured maintainer script configuration handling