Comment 7 for bug 372001

This is happening because the package is shipping the symlink as a conffile. Generally speaking, this isn't a great idea, and dpkg's handling of symlink-as-conffile cases is shockingly non-obvious.

Like most packages with symlink trees in /etc, what this should be doing is not shipping the symlink as a file, but rather creating it in the postinst on new installs (and only new installs), so a sysadming choosing to remove the symlink won't have to worry about it coming back spontaneously.