.rpmnew files during RPM upgrade

[Jonathan Gazeley]

I rolled and deployed an RPM of FreeRADIUS 2.2.0. As expected for RPM 
packages, it left a number of *.rpmnew files in /etc/raddb.

Trouble is, FreeRADIUS reads these files as live configs and was unable 
to start after the upgrade, until I had manually intervened and deleted 
the .rpmnew files.

This isn't a new issue, I found this old thread in the archive:

http://lists.freeradius.org/pipermail/freeradius-users/2008-December/033694.html

It seems to me that the "broken" behaviour is not with RPM but with 
FreeRADIUS. Can the regular expression that includes config files and 
modules be tweaked to exclude *.rpmnew files? It would be nice if an 
automated package management system didn't require manual intervention 
to ensure that a critical service keeps running upon upgrade.

If I hadn't rolled my own RPM, I would eventually have received an 
overnight update from CentOS, and my RADIUS servers would have remained 
broken until the morning. That's something I'd rather avoid, and 
something a lot of other admins would run into as well.

I don't really know much C but I looked at the source code. Blacklisting 
specific file suffixes seems like a bad way to do it, but I suppose it's 
too late now to insist that all config files end with .conf. Any other 
ideas?

Thanks,
Jonathan