RPM - Preventing uninstall and file conflicts.

Alright, this is a stupid question so I'm sorry to be asking it.  I've
searched the list back for the past 2 years and I couldn't find anyone
mentioning this and I'm stuck.  That said, I still must ask. :)

We have systems in several different, independant tiers in several
different environments.  Each tier has it's own general network settings
- /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts.allow, ntp.conf, etc.  Each tier is
entirely independant, they do not communicate with each other ( in most
cases ).  We keep these config files for all the tiers in a source
revision system on a management system.

What we'd like to do is create RPM's for each set of tier configuration
files.  So I'd like to have my 'configs-web-production-1.0.0' RPM with
/etc/hosts.allow, /etc/hosts, etc and then we simply install the correct
tier RPM for any given system, depending on which tier the system
resides in.  As a side note, all these systems are either RHEL3 or
RHEL4.

Now for the issues:

I've had to do the test installs with --force, as some of these files (
/etc/ntp.conf ) are owned by other packages ( ntp ).  NTP actually isn't
too much of an issue and could be repackaged, but other RPMS such as
'setup', a RHEL specific RPM, is not repackagable ( to my knowledge ).
So should I just continue to install our new config RPMs with --force or
does someone else have some advice on how to properly solve this?

The other issue that I have is that our config RPM really has no one
depending on it, so in truth, it could be uninstalled accidentally,
which would result in a system without some very important files.  The
only thing I can come up with would to be install an empty RPM that
requires our config RPM ( somewhat like the redhat-lsb RPM works.. ).
Any suggestions on this would also be welcome.

Thanks.

--
sh

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