ntpd as ntpd user question

[Pete Wright]

On 8/2/18 10:43 PM, Chris H wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:57:28 +0200 "Niclas Zeising" 
> <zeising+freebsd at daemonic.se> said
>
>> On 07/21/18 19:56, RW wrote:
>> > On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 11:14:45 -0600
>> > Ian Lepore wrote:
>> > > >> There's a "pre-world" stage of mergemaster (-Fp option I 
>> think) which
>> >> isn't needed often, but one of the times it is needed is apparently
>> >> when new user ids are added.
>> > > I wish mergemaster had an option to just add new users and groups,
>> > rather than merging the files.
>>
>> etcupdate is usually pretty good at automatically merge updates to 
>> files without user interaction, even when the files are locally 
>> edited as well.  For instance, I had no problem merging 
>> /etc/master.passwd and /etc/group for the ntp change.
>> Regards
>> -- 
>> Niclas
> FWIW I found mergemaster intimidating when I was first starting out. Not
> because I didn't understand patch(1)/diff(1). I was well familiar there.
> But I found it unintuitive. Despite the messages regarding it's usage.
> Anyway. I finally developed a strategy that worked for me.
> I start out with the standard
>
> mergemaster -p
>
> then the installworld
> But I implement the following mergemster, thusly
>
> mergemaster -vF
>
> It dispenses with asking about all the files that only have revision
> changes, and date differences, and just updates them, the -v portion,
> just keeps "enlightened" as to wtf is actually happening during the
> process.
> Then all that's left are just some 5-9 files I need to deal with,
> with mergemaster informing me that by default, it'll leave them
> for me, to look at later. To which I reply Y. Done.
> Knowing diff/patch, makes the resulting unmerged files a trivial
> task, requiring perhaps 5-10 minutes while still at the console.
> Then I reboot into the new system.
>

this certainly sums up my experience and workflow now.  if i were 
someone with more free time on my hands i'd look at adding an option to 
mergemaster to read in an env-var or the ~/.mergemasterrc file to use a 
diff program of choice.

i remember when i used to admin IRIX systems we would use xdiff 
frequently when updates of software required updates to configs, being a 
junior admin at the time and having a decent gui to manage diffs 
certainly made me feel more confident about the changes i was making.

but honestly this is such an edge case i haven't put any effort into 
hacking on this :)

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA