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From: Marc Schneiders <marc@schneiders.org>
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To: Doug Barton <DougB@freebsd.org>
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cc: Anton Zavrin <antonzav@pacbell.net>
cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: Mergemaster Request (RE: mergemaster tips)
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On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, at 15:22 [=GMT-0700], Doug Barton wrote:

> Ok, can you give me an example of something that you don't understand? I
> tried to be quite thorough in the man page,

And you are. I just read it for the first time after using mergemaster
for 3 or 4 years, and I learned a lot. As a result I set up a script
to back up my old /etc to some subdir by date and time and run that
through the mergemaster option to run something before it.

I thought this was clever, but I now see this isn't good enough. I do
not want to get an archive, in addition to normal backups, of a
complete 10 MB /etc directory each time I upgrade.

So here is the feature request: Is it possible to have a new option in
mergemaster:

-b (path)	Make a backup of every file that mergemaster
		overwrites, whether on user input or automatically.
		Mergemaster writes the files in a directory with a
		timestamp name (YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS) under the path
		indicated.

This would give us an archive of the config changes on the machine.

I do not have enough scripting to squeeze this into mergemaster
myself. Nothing near it.