RE: Questions about pkgbase [adding a *.pkgnew vs. *.pkgsave note]

Lexi Winter <ivy_at_freebsd.org> wrote on
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2025 09:17:30 UTC :

> Yasuhiro Kimura wrote in <20251002.180121.980053125503545103.yasu@FreeBSD.org>:
> > 1. Consistency with update using source tree
> . . .
> > On pkgbase system, however, files under /etc seems to belong to
> > packages. So they are updated by `pkg upgrade`. Then how confliction
> > is handled if it happnes?
> 
> pkg(8) will attempt a 3-way merge when installing a new configuration
> file. if this is successful, no action is required. if it fails, the
> existing file will be left unchanged and pkg will create a <name>.pkgnew
> file, which you need to manually merge with the existing version of the
> file.

I'll note here that for how I've been grading, I rarely see
*.pkgnew files but instead see *.pkgsave files. (I've been
experimenting with starting with "pkg install" instead of
"pkg upgrade" for base-package upgrades.)

So: If you see a *.pkgsave then the pre-existing file may not
have been left unchanged but instead be a copy of the new,
default file content and the *.pkgsave is then the old,
unchanged content.

(I do sometimes get a * and *.pkgave pair that "diff -u"
reports have no differences in content.)

(I'm not recommending my experiment. My pkgbase usage testing
includes doing some things somewhat oddly to see if I run
into problems that I should report as notable for folks that
happen to go off script.)

> this workflow is much worse than etcupdate or freebsd-update, and i'm
> not convinced we should release with pkgbase as the recommended option
> without a better solution, but we'll see.
> 
> note that this is *not* the same way ports handles new configuration
> files; this feature is not used by ports at all, it is specific to the
> base system.
> . . .


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com