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

[Oliver Fromme]

Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
 > 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.

Furthermore, it is non-trivial to automatically detect that
a change is inside a comment.  Many files use "#", but some
files use ";" or "//" for comments (e.g. BIND files), send-
mail mc files use "dnl" to introduce comments, and I'm sure
there are others.  Ignoring everything that starts with "#"
would be a particularly bad idea, because there are files
where that character does _not_ introduce a comment.

I agree with Doug that changes in comments are sometimes
important enough to be read by the admin, e.g. if a default
setting changes or an important new option is introduced.
Of course, there are also sometimes changes that just fix
typos, and dealing with those might be a waste of time, but
that's no a valid reason to ignore _all_ changes inside
comments.

Here's my recommendation for /etc/mergemaster.rc:

DIFF_FLAG='-Bub'                # Hide changes in whitespace
DIFF_OPTIONS='-I$FreeBSD:.*[$]' # Ignores CVS Id tags
IGNORE_MOTD=yes                 # Ignores changes in motd

Of course, as always:  YMMV.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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