"Chatty" config files in /etc

[Sergey Babkin]

Garance A Drosehn wrote:
> 
> I think you misunderstand the goal.  This is meant to benefit every
> single user who *updates* FreeBSD.  That is a much larger audience
> than committers.  This split has nothing to do with merging changes
> into the FreeBSD source repository.
> 
> The merge we are talking about is the step where every FreeBSD user
> runs 'mergemaster' (or something equivalent) to bring in important
> changes to files under /etc, without losing all the important
> localizations that every sysadmin has to do.  It effects every user
> who ever does a 'cd /usr/src ; make installworld'.

Well, the _real_ fix for it would be to have a specific script for each
file in /etc that would convert the settings between the old
and new format. If there were no format change between the FreeBSD
versions then it would just do nothing. If the format has changed 
in a compatible way (say, just new optional settings were added) 
then it might just add comments about that. The critical part to it
would be having the version number information in the file. Or if
that is missing then do the assumption from the FreeBSD version
being upgraded.

-SB