A smarter mergemaster

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:41:57 -0700
> From: Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> 
> One of the design decisions that you need to be aware of for this project
> since day one was to try and balance intelligent behavior and configuration
> options that would be useful for the very small percentage of the FreeBSD
> user community that constitutes our developers, versus the needs of the vast
> majority of "regular" users who need to be able to use the tool without
> becoming experts in either our build system, or the tool itself. That is why
> every single default for mergemaster is to do nothing. It was a purposeful
> decision to require the user to examine change requests, and make an
> affirmative choice to approve them.

Doug,

You just hit on one of my pet peeves with mergemaster! Contrary to what
you say: "every single default for mergemaster is to do nothing", when a
file is found in /etc/rc.d that is not in /usr/src/etc/rc.d, the default
is to delete the file in etc. I think that this is a bad thing(tm). I
have to restore my profile.sh (which MUST be in /etc/rc.d as it needs to
be run before /usr is mounted).

I do have an open PR on this (conf/85449), but it does not seem to have
gone anywhere other than being assigned to you last Friday. (No, I
didn't expect anything to happen this quickly. You just gave me such a
perfect opportunity to gripe!)

By the way, having run FreeBSD before mergemaster, it's a huge
improvement on those ugly days.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634