A proposal @senior and I were thinking about, was to instead drop a warning message in this file instead and keep it managed by packaging. A warning in a comment - something pointing the user at logback.xml for example. That would force users to acknowledge the change when upgrading, as Debian will prompt (Yes/No/Diff etc.) if the file has been modified from the package, and RPM will drop a log4j.properties.rpmnew file next to the old one.

Its kind of a soft way of forcing acknowledgement during installation, it can be ignored of course - so we should also add this to the release notes, but might be okay.

What do you think @cprice404?