From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun May 13 11:14:15 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from dt051n37.san.rr.com (dt051n37.san.rr.com [204.210.32.55]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0D95337B422 for ; Sun, 13 May 2001 11:14:12 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from DougB@DougBarton.net) Received: from DougBarton.net (master [10.0.0.2]) by dt051n37.san.rr.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA72579; Sun, 13 May 2001 11:14:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from DougB@DougBarton.net) Message-ID: <3AFECEED.8BF425EF@DougBarton.net> Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 11:14:05 -0700 From: Doug Barton Organization: Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Karsten W. Rohrbach" Cc: Kris Kennaway , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SSH Must Die References: <3AFD1D6D.51731EAC@mindspring.com> <20010512072320L.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <3AFDC640.83A13495@mindspring.com> <20010512193354.A47163@xor.obsecurity.org> <20010513190026.A18437@mail.webmonster.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG "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 $ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message