Should I be able to use mergemaster with freebsd-update?
Mike Brown
mike at skew.org
Wed Jun 26 07:07:31 UTC 2013
I wrote:
> The main problem this time is that I'm not so lucky with the password files,
> because for 8.4, freebsd-update has fetched new, stock .db files to put in
> /etc.
Whoa, sorry, I misspoke here.
freebsd-update asked me, after the merges, to approve unspecified differences
in pwd.db and spwd.db. I assumed that it had fetched those files as part of
the 8.4 distribution. But http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/8.4.0/etc/
seems to indicate that's not what happened; only master.passwd was changed.
I'm looking through the freebsd-update code now. I see it does actually do
some special handling of master.passwd, but not until you do your
'freebsd-update install'. At that point, it will look at /etc/master.passwd
and see if it's newer than /etc/pwd.db or /etc/spwd.db, and it will run
pwd_mkdb. It doesn't use the -p flag, so I guess it doesn't care about passwd.
This pwd_mkdb run didn't happen for me, though, since my 'freebsd-update
install' run didn't actually put the new master.passwd file, or anything else,
into /etc yet. I thought it would, but I don't understand it, really. So I
don't see how it's supposed to work.
To summarize:
1. I did the initial 'freebsd-update -r 8.4-RELEASE upgrade'
2. When prompted, I did all the merges it needed me to do by hand.
3. When prompted, I approved all the diffs. Two of the diffs were unspecified
pwd.db & spwd.db changes, which caused me some alarm.
4. I looked in the staging area and found that these were empty files.
5. I looked in /etc and nothing new had been placed there yet.
6. I did the 'freebsd-update install' and checked /etc again; still nothing.
7. Afraid of rebooting with bogus password database files staged, I generated
proper pwd.db, spwd.db, and passwd files myself, and put them in the
staging area.
Next step, I think, is reboot, before another 'freebsd-update install' run.
I'm worried something is still amiss, though, so I'm holding off for now. :(
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