Readers' forum

The book points out lots of subtleties of conffiles, config files, and the special handling that such files get during upgrades. However, I'm still quite confused.

From page 230, my understanding is that:
1. Config file = any file under /etc
2. Conffile = the subset of config files that are specially handled by dpkg

I'm especially interested in files under /etc that are NOT conffiles. These seem to fall into several categories:
1. Files dynamically modified based on responses gathered by debconf (page 230).
2. Files managed by ucf or similar tools (page 205-206).
3. Miscellaneous files. For example, page 291 says that /etc/profile is installed by package base-files. However, "dpkg -s base-files" does not list /etc/profile as one of its conffiles.

With all this as background, here are some specific questions I still have:
1. What's a good place to learn about how/which files are managed by ucf?
2. Regarding /etc/profile, how would one figure out that it was installed by package base-files if one didn't already know that? Is /etc/profile handled by ucf? Or by some other special handler? Obviously user changes to /etc/profile have to be preserved by default.
3. Is there a general method to figure out how non-conffile config files are managed? For example /etc/passwd. What package installed the original version of /etc/passwd on the system? Or is /etc/passwd created and maintained exclusively by passwd(1) and manual edits?

I am sorry for not responding in *months*. Your question is an interesting one. Might I suggest you post it to the debian-user mailinglist? I'll be glad to answer it there.

-m