From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 19 11:16:31 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7DB3C16A4CE for ; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 11:16:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from otter3.centtech.com (moat3.centtech.com [207.200.51.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EE07C43D3F for ; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 11:16:29 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Received: from centtech.com (neutrino.centtech.com [10.177.171.220]) by otter3.centtech.com (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id i0JJGS6T046887; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 13:16:29 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Message-ID: <400C2CF3.6080401@centtech.com> Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 13:16:03 -0600 From: Eric Anderson User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Garance A Drosihn References: <400C012E.4040002@mail.ru> <400C0E5F.5010606@potentialtech.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org cc: Bill Moran Subject: Re: question on mergemaster X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 19:16:31 -0000 Garance A Drosihn wrote: >> The optimistic way to do this would be to have some sort of >> switch to mergemaster to tell it to go into autoupdate mode, >> and it will only ask for files that contain a "negative >> magic" like: # mergemaster noautoreplace >> In which case the administrator should put this string at >> the beginning of every file that he tweaks in /etc > > > This is probably easier to implement, but there is still a > good chance that someone will make an important change to > some /etc file, and: > 1) not-know to add the line > (documentation? Who reads documentation?) > 2) know, but still forget to do it > 3) remember to do it, but misspell the magic line. > > And at some future system update their change will be automatically > and quietly erased. And depending on the change, they might not > realize that it is gone until weeks or months after having made > the mistake. > > I think it would be a mistake if we streamline mergemaster to > the point that users can easily start losing updates. I think you missed something - "some sort of switch to mergemaster to tell it to go into autoupdate mode" - which I understood it to mean, that the default action will not change, unless you use a "mergemaster -I" or some such beast.. Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Systems Administrator Centaur Technology All generalizations are false, including this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------