Preservation of system state considered harmful

[Sean Perry]

Rick Moen wrote:
> (linuxmafia.com had 22 hours of downtime, on account of being my sloppy,
> but lost no data; cost me a few hours' recovery work.)
> 
> IRC log:
> 
> 
> 11:57 < redrick> Reason my rants page now malfunctions probably points directly 
>                  to the method of breakin:
> 11:57 < redrick> Old site had PHP register_globals = On.
> 11:58 < redrick> Illustrates an interesting Debian pitfall:  It's easy to 
>                  forget, as you upgrade packages, that /etc/* contains fossil 
>                  configuration that may be a liability, security or otherwise.
> 11:59 < redrick> PHP devels had a big fight over register_globals, and changed 
>                  the default as of PHP 4.2, even though it was expected to 
>                  break lots of extant code.  But my site didn't get the new 
>                  /etc/php4/apache/php.ini config, because I was preserving 
>                  machine state during upgrades.

curious. "I was preserving machine state during upgrades"? Does this 
mean that you had dpkg set to not ask "You have modified this config 
file, should I overwrite it?"?