Rudder

From http://www.rudder-project.org/rudder-doc-2.11/rudder-doc.html#_upgrade_rudder_on_debian_or_ubuntu:

Rudder includes a script for upgrading all files, databases, etc… which need migrating. Therefore, you should not replace your old files by the new ones when apt-get/aptitude asks about this, unless you want to reset all your parameters.

Well, actually init scripts are not supposed to ask a question :)

I'll try to reproduce this.

From the dh_installdeb(1) man page:

In v3 compatibility mode and higher, all files in the etc/ directory in a package will automatically be flagged as conffiles by this program, so there is no need to list them manually here.

So the init script will have been flagged as a conffile, and thus dpkg is asking about updating it. Grrrr.

It's only asking if it has been modified. If the conffile hasn't been modified, dpkg will replace it silently. If it was modified and you called dpkg with '--force-confold', then it's not replaced and the new file is installed with a .dpkg.dist extension. If it was not modified and you called dpkg with '--force-confold', same behavior, because this option forces to keep the old conffile (this can be surprising, if you use '--force-confold' you need to add '--force-confdef' to let dpkg overwrite unmodified conffile).