question on mergemaster

[Leonhard Wimmer]

On Jan 19 20:09, rihad wrote:
> Hi. I was wondering if there are any improvements planned to be made to
> mergemaster? After today's cvsup I had to sit and keep pressing either
> "q" (to break out of the pager) or "i" to accept the new file. This *is*
> boring, considering there seemed to be no end to them and I eventually
> killed mergemaster, because I had started to get nervous and make silly
> typos :). It's just my toy home machine and there's only few files under
> /etc that I care about, and these mergemaster doesn't touch anyway (like
> fstab, rc.conf etc). Wouldn't it be great if one could add the "assume
> yes" flag so that it overwrites without prompting (like gentoo's
> etc-update does when you ask it). Currently I came up with this dirty
> hack to save myself from hundreds of confirmations, it kind of worked:
> 
> # ( echo d; while :; do echo -e "q\ni"; done ) | mergemaster -i
> 
> Is such an "no-prompt" option considered important enough to be
> integrated RSN or am I missing some obvious and convenient usage pattern
> everyone know about?

  It would be really nice if mergemaster automatically replaces all
the files which weren't changed by the user. This could be done with
an MD5 database of all the files in /etc. If they weren't changed
since the last mergemaster they are automatically updated and if they
were changed mergemaster asks the user what to do.

Leo