freebsd-update and locally modfied files

[Colin Percival]

Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
> Can you help me by suggesting what I need to do when I want to use
> freebsd-update fetch (FBSD 6.2) but get the following message:
> 
> The following files are affected by updates, but no changes have
> been downloaded because the files have been modified locally:
> /etc/rc.d/jail

Probably what happened is that you installed a patched FreeBSD (e.g.,
6.2-RELEASE-p2) in which /etc/rc.d/jail was already updated.  As a
result of CVS modifying $FreeBSD$ tags when commits happen, this makes
the /etc/rc.d/jail file which you get by installing from the source
code very slightly different from what you get by using FreeBSD Update
(since the FreeBSD Update patches are built before the CVS commits are
done, this is unavoidable); consequently, FreeBSD Update doesn't
recognize the file and thinks that you modified it locally.

> Now, I do not recall ever playing with jail. Anyway, how do I update the
> system (and keep changes to /etc/rc.d/jail (if any))?

The easiest solution is to remove /etc/ from the UpdateIfUnmodified line
in /etc/freebsd-update.conf and run freebsd-update again.  Make sure that
you add /etc/ back afterwards.

Colin Percival