Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 18:01:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug Barton <DougB@FreeBSD.org> To: "Michael W . Lucas" <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org> Cc: Alexey Zelkin <phantom@FreeBSD.org.ua> Subject: Re: removing stale files (was: Re: cvs commit: src/etc Makefile locale.alias locale.deprecated nls.alias) Message-ID: <20030615173721.Q32802@znfgre.qbhto.arg> In-Reply-To: <20030610192329.A15847@blackhelicopters.org> References: <20030610124747.A7560@phantom.cris.net> <20030610192329.A15847@blackhelicopters.org>
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On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Michael W . Lucas wrote:
> [cc trimmed]
>
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 12:47:47PM +0300, Alexey Zelkin wrote:
> > But I think there're already someone who
> > has it implemented. Otherwise I'll spend some time, write and commit
> > it.
>
> NetBSD's etcupdate has this functionality, and a bunch of other stuff.
>
> Of course, etcupdate started life as our mergemaster...
That's not strictly correct. I had a chat with luke about this recently.
He has somewhat different goals in mind than I do. etcupdate does things
differently than mergemaster does it, and there is also another program
called /etc/postinstall that does a few other things differently, but
related.
The main difference between his approach and mine is that his stuff has
specific, and sometimes detailed knowledge about individual files. I
purposely avoided that approach, which makes mergemaster a lot more
flexible, at the cost of not necessarily making the _files_ all the same
when you're done. What I wanted to do instead was to make the
_configuration_ the same (i.e., updated to the latest stuff), while
potentially leaving some crufty files behind that should probably be
deleted by hand at some point.
There are pluses and minuses to both approaches. My method allows the
users more flexibility in customizing their stuff, at the cost of
requiring them to do more maintenance by hand to keep things clean.
Since stale files in /etc usually don't cause much if any harm, I felt
like this was the better approach.
Doug
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