[PATCH] review requested, add a feature to mergemaster

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 10:17 PM +0100 1/12/05, Anton Berezin wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 12, 2005, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>  > At 2:53 PM +0100 1/12/05, Anton Berezin wrote:
>  > >
>>  >A new option is added:
>>  >
>>  > -R cvsroot  For files that contain a $FreeBSD$ string,
>  >
>>  Hmm.  I'm not sure how useful this will be (not that I object
>  > to it in anyway, I'm just not sure...).


>A single, probably not very useful datapoint: install 5.3-RELEASE,
>cvsup to RELENG_5, {build,install}{world,kernel}, then do mergemaster.
>This currently leads to about 20 cases of "pointless diffs", all of
>which go away when using this option.

I understand the desired goal.  I'm just not sure that this
option will be generally useful.

>If a concern is that only a minority of machines have /home/ncvs
>installed, then the answer would be that "cvsroot" is a generic
>string, which can be anything cvs -d accepts, meaning that
>various :pserver: and :ext:-based solutions shall work.

If a user is following the rules for upgrading, then the really
important mergemaster run is done in single-user mode.  You do
not have networking, you do not have NFS, you do not even have the
any value set for `hostname`.  Thus, if that user does not have
the cvs repository on their local hard disk, then this option will
require several additional steps (and those steps may not be
convenient, particularly for someone who gets their network
address via DHCP).

Again, let me point out that I am not objecting to this idea.  I am
only saying that it may not be as useful as it first seems to be.

>  > But let me note:
>
>>  >+For files that contain a $FreeBSD$ string,
>
>>  Be careful when trying to add the literal string of $FreeBSD$ to any
>>  documentation file.  This will look fine when you are testing it, but
>>  when you *commit* it, CVS will expand that string into the
>>  FreeBSD-version information for that file.
>
>Thanks, that shall be changed to just "$FreeBSD", as it already
>appears elsewhere in the manual.

Sounds good.  That was the main purpose of my message.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu