Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 11:14:05 -0700 From: Doug Barton <DougB@DougBarton.net> To: "Karsten W. Rohrbach" <karsten@rohrbach.de> Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SSH Must Die Message-ID: <3AFECEED.8BF425EF@DougBarton.net> References: <3AFD1D6D.51731EAC@mindspring.com> <20010512072320L.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <3AFDC640.83A13495@mindspring.com> <20010512193354.A47163@xor.obsecurity.org> <20010513190026.A18437@mail.webmonster.de>
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"Karsten W. Rohrbach" wrote:
> is there a way to make the upgrade process easier by doing the thing
> mergemaster does but with an interface that does not kill the average
> ordinary user with a simple prompt without really useful help
> incantating strange phrases to summon the subprocesses that diff and
> patch and apply the arcane magic?
> the average luser cannot deal with diff outputs
There is a school of thought that says if you cannot handle something as
simple as a diff output you probably shouldn't be running unix. I'm all for
making things simpler for users, but there is a level beyond which it's not
possible to go without turning into windows.
That said, I am working on some things to make mm handle cases where the
user has not modified the files easier to deal with.
> so it would make sense
> to have a simple program displaying the old version in the upper and the
> new in the lower part of the screen, allowing the user to choose what to
> do next. i am not quite sure, but i think about it "feeling" like vim or
> emacs in splitscreen mode editing version-tagged files.
As Kris said in his previous post, your patches are welcome. One problem
with your approach however is that if you show the user all of both files
they are very likely to miss important changes. Tools like diff were
developed precisely because picking small changes out of large bodies of
text is one thing that computers do well (or at least, better than humans).
Also, with sdiff (which is what mm invokes to do the merge) it displays old
and new on the left and right sides of the screen and gives you several
options for how to merge the two together, including editing both old and
new together. Check out the man page for sdiff.
> btw, mergemaster's version number generation for the help/syntax page is
> broken because it displays the number of the running kernel not the
> version of mergemaster itself:
It's completely impossible for mm to get "the number of the running
kernel," whatever that is, as its version number.
# mergemaster -h
mergemaster version 1.18
. . .
# ident /usr/sbin/mergemaster
/usr/sbin/mergemaster:
$FreeBSD: src/usr.sbin/mergemaster/mergemaster.sh,v 1.18 2001/03/29
14:04:19 asmodai Exp $
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