Advice sought on upgrading from 4.11-R to 5.4...

[Doug Barton]

Robert Backhaus wrote:
> On 9/29/05, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>>Brad Knowles wrote:
>>
>>
>>>    However, it would be nice if mergemaster could be made to
>>>automatically accept changes that occur only in the comments of the
>>>files it is trying to merge.
>>
>>What would be nice is if people actually read the man page for mergemaster,
>>which has had this example in it for a long time now.
> 
> 
> I just read the mergemaster man page (6.0B2 box), and it contains no
> usch example, or reference. None of the options seem to have this
> effect either.
> 
> Maybe you are thinking of an Open- of NetBSD mergemaster?
> 

Ah, I misread the original message. Usually people are complaining about the
CVS Ids in the comments, as opposed to the comments themselves.

I disagree that ignoring comments in the files is a good idea. There is no
way for mergemaster to know for sure if the comment is material or not,
that's the admin's job.

Upgrading across a major version is a difficult task, no matter how its
approached. IIRC, the original example was upgrading from 4.x to 5.x, which,
like most major version upgrades, should be done by backing up your data and
doing a fresh install anyway. This is particularly important over the 4 -> 5
change, since by upgrading from source you're missing the UFS2 update.

Thanks for pointing out that I missed the detail in the original post in any
case.

Doug