Re: etcupdate -- is there a way to get it to delete $FreeBSD$ strings from my files?

> On Nov 24, 2025, at 6:46 PM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> "Dan Mahoney (ports)" <freebsd@gushi.org> writes:
>> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des@FreeBSD.org> writes:
>>> `etcupdate extract` does not touch /etc, it populates /var/db/etcupdate.
>>> You should only run it if /var/db/etcupdate is empty or does not match
>>> your installed system.  If you ran it with a source tree that does not
>>> match your installed system, you have now lost the ability to correctly
>>> track changes to /etc.
>> Dag,
> 
> That's not my name, Bob.

First, let me apologize for this.  It clearly set our communications off on the wrong foot.

>> It sounds like when you say /var/db/etcupdate, you're describing what
>> the man page describes as the "work dir" [...]  If that's the case,
>> that's a manpage failure.
> 
> No, it's a reader failure.  The manual page is perfectly clear, you
> just chose not to read it.
> 
>> The only thing the manpage says about "extract mode" is:
>> 
>>   Extract Mode
>>     The extract mode generates a new “current” tree.  Unlike the default
>>     mode, it does not save any existing “current” tree and does not modify
>>     any existing “previous” tree.  The new “current” tree can either be built
>>     from a source tree or extracted from a tarball.
>> 
>> It's easy to read that as either of "extract updates the workdir" or
>> "extract generates a real, current tree in actual /etc",
> 

I still don't know how -D plays into the extract command, but in the end, it didn't seem to matter.

What I really missed was that elsewhere in the manpage, the author directly says, in effect, "sure, copy things out of the current directory" until you get to a reasonable point.

Because there's mention *of* the $FreeBSD$ stuff in the manpage, I really thought it was a special case somehow.  It's become clear that over the years this system was updated -- first from freebsd-update, then from pkgbase, and later, from source, when pkgbase started breaking things earlier this year, that the steps required to update /etc weren't always properly followed all the way along. 

At this point, my `etcupdate diff` is down to only the files you'd expect (passwd, group, and the like), and I feel way better moving forward.

Thanks for the help and the patience.

-Dan