http://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=901115 http://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=901115#c16
--- Comment #16 from Lars Marowsky-Bree lmb@suse.com --- I agree, I never understood the rationale here. This seemed like a pretty severe bug to me, but I simply gave up.
My suggestion would be, like with other scripts, to detect manual modifications and *not overwrite them*, but place the new files as xxx.new. Or, yes, at the very least *create a backup* of the files you're about to overwrite.