The 24/08/12, Oon-Ee Ng wrote:
If the files are provided in linked packages to their functionality, there'd be a new .pacnew everytime the linked package was updated.
I have no idea what you are talking about, sorry. Packages have dependencies to other packages and I don't know how a package can be linked to a "functionnality". There is no SONAME for configuration files. Packages ― including dependencies ― have a litteral name and a version to know if a it needs update. As long as version dependency is not bumped, there won't have update (see dep_vercmp() in libalpm http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/tree/lib/libalpm/deps.c#n353). BTW, my point is what kind of upgrade can you reasonably expect for such files, which you don't reply to.
If the files are grouped together in a 'default-confs' package, if for any reason upstream changes any one of them, all the rest would generate a .pacnew
Which remains to my previous point: what kind of reason could require an update for such files ? As a side note upstream is arch maintainers, here. -- Nicolas Sebrecht