A smarter mergemaster

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Brian Candler wrote:

>That's my biggest bugbear with mergemaster - it asks you about
>a zillion files in /etc/rc.d which you have to manually agree to overwrite
>just because the RCS ID has changed. In those cases where you've not altered
>them yourself, I think you should just get the latest version. However to do
>this properly, you'd need checksums of the original files. [*]
>  
>
Not necessarily.  Diff can be made to ignore changes which match 
specific regular expressions (-I), so if you can reliably match the RCS 
Id lines you can ignore those changes.

Note, though, that this is different from files which you haven't 
changed.  The new version might change more than the RCS Id, in which 
you would be back to checksums, or some such.  However, a change to 
automatically install files where *only* the RCS Id had changed would be 
easier and quicker to effect than the general case of all files which 
you hadn't changed.

--Alex