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Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 20:06:33 -0700
From: Doug Barton <DougB@dougbarton.net>
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cc: Doug Barton <dougb@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: 6.0 on Alpha
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Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Ruslan Ermilov <ru@freebsd.org> writes:
> 
>>But I specifically made the "distribution" target in
>>src/etc/Makefile install the device.hints file, in a hope that
>>mergemaster(8) will pick it up.  Is it not the case?
> 
> 
> Yup.  Could you please do the same with loader.rc?  It's currently the
> only file in the system that is never updated by world or mergemaster.
> 
> 
>>Ah, it looks like mergemaster(8) only cares about updating /etc,
>>which is bad.  :-(
> 
> 
> wrong, mergemaster handles /boot/device.hints just fine.

DES is correct, mm uses src/etc/Makefile which builds a complete tree,
and populates it with various files, mostly in /etc/ of course, but mm
compares all the real files in that "temproot" tree.

One thing we could do rather than continuing to "abuse" src/etc/Makefile
by adding things like /boot/device.hints is give mm some specific
knowledge about files like that, but I've studiously tried to avoid
giving it "special knowledge" about files for a lot of reasons. The most
important to me was not adding extra burdens to either myself or
maintainers of other parts of the tree to update that special knowledge,
but also important is the problem of updates across various boundaries.
It's currently quite possible to use older versions of mm to update
newer systems, but the more special knowledge about individual files you
give it, the harder that is to maintain.

Doug

-- 
    If you're never wrong, you're not trying hard enough