A smarter mergemaster

[Yar Tikhiy]

[Replying to everyone who mentioned etcmerge or 3-way merge in general]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 12:15:59AM -0700, Jon Dama wrote:
> It is worth while to mention sysutils/etcmerge.
> 
> Having the "three-way" merge makes the process much better.  The primary
> way I've shot myself with mergemaster is forgetting some local change.
> 
> Being able to distinguish the class of things that are changing upstream
> really helps the situation and provides a more reasonable indication of
> the default:
>    if it changed upstream but not locally => default is install
>    if it changed locally but not upstream => default is keep
>    if it changed locally and upstream => default is merge

Obviously, in order to do a 3-way merge, we need information about
the old versions of original files as well.  However, currently we
have only the new versions in /usr/src and local versions in /etc
for mergemaster to work with.  I'll be glad to hear how etcmerge
approaches this issue.

In any case, we cannot offer the users to access the CVS repo when
merging /etc.  Personally, I'd like to see a complete copy of current
unmodified /etc files installed to /usr/share/examples/etc.  They
could serve as the old original versions for the 3-way merge then.
Alas, now the copy installed there is rather incomplete, motivation
of which is unknown to me yet.  Any ideas?

-- 
Yar