please commit

Ben, thanks for handling this and pointing me back to the OLD: output line.
The one incremental improvement I have made afterwards is to expand the ${PREFIX} - %%PREFIX%% does that magic when substituting placeholders by real strings from files/foo.in to foo.

In D17088#389607, @woodsb02 wrote:

As per the existing code, if the contents of ${newfile} are the same as ${samplefile} then there is no destruction to move ${oldfile} to ${newfile}. If the user wants to recover the content of the clobbered newfile - it is fully available in samplefile.

In D17088#389354, @mat wrote:

The problem is that if you do not remove the file, and have foo and foo.conf both saying rotate xxx, both will be used, and I'm sure the behavior is undocumented and probably won't be what you expect.

(and yes it's only newsyslog, not Postfix's main.cf or your Samba PDC configuration)

mat@ choice is unacceptable because it can destroy data. In rare circumstances, but it's still possible.

There is one change that I'd like made, and that's we should not remove ${oldfile}, instead make the user migrate ${oldfile} to ${newfile}.
Other than that, seems good to go.

Given we got slapped over the head last time we went forward with this, I see this new proposed change is trying to be more careful. Please see detailed comments and questions therein.

Thanks. This is looking almost good, just the error handling for the close() and we should be done. I haven't been able to do run-time testing yet.

The patch isn't clean, not against the 2013 version of my script in SVN - if I download the patch here, I cannot apply it, the second hunk fails, and wiggling it leads to a merge failure. Apparently the patch was not created against what is currently in SVN but a locally modified version. When editing the code as suggested by the comments above, please recreate the patch against what is in SVN.