svn: head/usr.sbin/mergemaster

[Ivan Voras]

2009/1/3 Julian Elischer <julian at elischer.org>:
> Ivan Voras wrote:
>
>>
>> And just how can upgrading all the non-user-modified files cause
>> serious damage here (serious=system not bootable, login not possible,
>> etc)? Please explain with examples, since from this and the old
>> current@ thread I only got the impression that "it's baaaad, m'kay".
>> Note that regular users will not upgrade -CURRENT, and most won't even
>> upgrade -STABLE, but will go from one -RELEASE to another. Speaking
>> for myself, mergemaster is a source of constant irritation because it
>> doesn't do auto-upgrades by default, and I'm often tempted to just not
>> start it rather than going through 15 minutes of "q, i, <enter>" (my
>> pages is less, thus the "q").
>
> Not to mention the times when it seems some large number of files
> get a change in CVS ID or whatever for some reason (and no other change (for
> example someone put a tem change in some subset of
> the rc.d files and then removed it) which seems to happen
> regularly, then you have to go i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i
> for 10 minutes, and then you get into finger-typeahead and
> it then goes right past the one file you DIDN'T want to change
> and you have lost /etc/master.passwd or something.

Yes, I completely forgot to rant about the typeahead problem :)

On the other hand, this might point to a user-interface problem. Maybe
if instead of constantly requesting user input it could be modified to
work differently - maybe it could generate a machine readable report
of files and autoload it in $EDITOR, in which the user could mark the
files en masse (in some easy way, for example by killing the lines
containing filenames he doesn't want to upgrade, prepending filenames
with "m" for merging, etc), which would then be processed by the
script? But again this would save irritation only if there's a quick
way to specify "just upgrade everything that wasn't changed by the
user".

> The -U option goes part way towards this.. How does it know what files
> have not been user modified?  Does it store hashes from the last run
> somewhere?

I think that's what /var/db/mergemaster.mtree is used for.