I made the mistake of installing Jenkins from the ubuntu package, which causes endless stress around here in update management. I have no quarrel with how Ubuntu arranged the files on disk.
For the curious, jenkins has an internal package manager that downloads plugin updates, and careful coordination of main jenkins installs and plugin upgrades is required to avoid chaotic conditions. So we haver to carefully block jenkins upgrades via, oh, apt-get upgrade when we don't know exactly what's going on with the plugins.
So, what I'd like to do is persuade dpkg / apt-get to forget that there is a jenkins package, without letting it delete any existing files.
By the way, the 'install' consists of one '.war' file plus the /etc/init.d links.
Obviously, I can backup up what I care about, remove the package, and restore, but I was hoping to learn that there was an obscure dpkg option that forgot to delete files.
Is there a way?