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

[Uffe Jakobsen]

On 2013-10-01 11:16, Ivan Voras wrote:
> 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 #
>

I've had the same expierience during some upgrades.
I've never been able to find the exact reason.
But my theory is that the mergemaster reacts on some specific settings 
on the affected systems - it be env or config files.

Unfortunately I've reinstalled the affected system (in rage) so further 
bug hunting is not possible. On newer installs the problem has not shown 
up...

/Uffe