Is freebsd-update braindamaged, or I'm using it wrong?

[Ivan Voras]

This is the first time I've used freebsd-update in years, and I'm
immediately flagging it as something I won't use in the future. For
the last half hour it has been forcing me to manually resolve, one by
one, in an editor, hundreds of "merge conflicts" such as these:

  1 <<<<<<< current version
  2 # $FreeBSD: release/9.0.0/etc/gettytab 209954 2010-07-12 19:09:18Z bcr $
  3 =======
  4 # $FreeBSD: release/9.2.0/etc/gettytab 243623 2012-11-27 19:23:54Z peterj $
  5 >>>>>>> 9.2-RELEASE
  6 #       from: @(#)gettytab      5.14 (Berkeley) 3/27/91
  7 #

This is fairly ridiculous. Then, at a random file it has proposed its
own merge and asked the prompt "Does this look reasonable?". It was
not, but when I answered it with "n" it stopped the whole process
(instead of maybe opening the file in the editor for me to merge
again).

I've since retried the process and it behaves the same, and then tried
it on another system and again - the same type of manual merges and
the same exit from the process when answering "n" to a botched merge.

In both cases, I'm upgrading from either 9.0-RELEASE or 9.1-RELEASE to
9.2-RELEASE and the command line was "freebsd-update upgrade -r
9.2-RELEASE".

Am I doing something wrong, or is freebsd-update simply quirky and not
that useful?