very high risk for users to overwrite the existing files with these dummy files when upgrading DokuWiki
What about simply suffixing such files with ".dist", like it's already bin done with other files?
Therefore, I think the only possible way one may implement this would be some kind of check-function which creates the empty .local files if they do not already exist.
This will not be necessary if named as noted above.
Moreover there should be something like a
global policy on handling foreign modifications, so whereever i see a "local/" subdir, i know that this will override/extend the default behaveiour, like whereever i see a file named "local.something.conf" it's specific to my installtion, or "local.something.conf.dist" it shows that i
can handle own settings here if i want. Therefore "local"-dirs and "local"-files should be added as stubs.