svn: head/usr.sbin/mergemaster

[Doug Barton]

Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> Doug Barton wrote:
>> My other objections remain however, including the one about the -U
>> option being a better solution that requires no new code.
> 
> 1. -U option requires system to have the copy of the database from the
> previous upgrade. It gives no help on the system that was installed from
> CD.

The man page clearly documents adding a DIFF_OPTION to ignore the CVS
Id tags which the user can use the first time through. Thus they can
do the update with new sources and build a database for the -U option
next time through (which happens automatically in the background every
time mergemaster is run).

> 2. If the functionality has some issues leading to false positives I can
> investigate and improve/fix.

This is a given.

> 3. I don't see anything so technically bad about that feature (put aside
> implementation details). I would like to hear some of your principal
> objections.

As in any software project, extra code that isn't needed is a Bad
Thing. It has maintenance costs down the road, and can lead to
problems if one of the expectations its built on changes.

A key part of the implementation of mergemaster is that it is (now,
relatively) simple, and knows as little as possible about the files it
manipulates.

As I said in my first post, if there is overwhelming demand for this
down the road that is not met by the existing solutions I'll consider
adding a better implementation as an option, off by default.

Doug

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