What we keep under /etc (was: cvs commit: src/etc rc rc.shutdown src/etc/rc.d ...)

[Eivind Eklund]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2004 at 01:31:52PM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On 2004-10-10 03:12, Makoto Matsushita <matusita at jp.FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> > brian> Ok, so etc/mtree can be left out.  What about etc/periodic and etc/rc.d?
> > [...]
> > If there's a chance that users may modify /etc files, "overriding /etc
> > files silently" should be avoided as we can, IMHO.
> 
> The overwriting of some directories in /etc can be made optional and default
> to off (keeping the current behavior, but allowing faster updates of a part of
> /etc for those who want it), if that's what's worrying you.
> 
> We could add an option to mergemaster like -f which would take a list of /etc
> subdirectories to blindly overwrite

If you are going to fix mergemaster, I suggest you do it right.  Upgrade
it to do a 3-way merge, and create the base by logging what mergemaster
created the last time.

This is relatively simple; the code to do everything around /etc
updates based on 3-way merge is fairly precisely half the size of
mergemaster's code (because there is less fiddling with weird cases when
doing things right.)

Adding more kludges to mergemaster is a bad idea.  If the way it
presently works annoy you (and it does me), either fix it to do things
right (which is a 3-way merge), or replace it with something that does
the right thing.

Eivind.