Comment 16 for bug 1063639

Here's the perspective of the Debian resolvconf maintainer. Resolvconf is in Debian an optional package and is often installed on a Debian system whose resolver was previously configured by hand. It is almost impossible to write maintainer scripts that perfectly handle all possible previous custom configurations; however a number of things are done in the Debian resolvconf maintainer scripts to increase the chances that the installation goes well and doesn't leave the system without name service. One of the measures is to offer the admin the option of "linking tail to original", i.e., of including the pre-existing static file in the dynamically generated file. Doing this is never the best thing to do, but it can be better than not doing it if the admin doesn't know yet how to configure resolvconf properly.

In Ubuntu resolvconf was never really an optional package (it was broken in Universe for a few years) before it became a standard package. It rarely gets installed on an Ubuntu system that was previously configured by hand. So "link tail to original" is not likely to be helpful on an Ubuntu system. I would be happy to see the feature removed from the Ubuntu package and, now that I think about it, I think it's time to remove it from the Debian package as well. So maybe I'll just axe it in the next release and then it will disappear from the Ubuntu package the next time there's a sync.