CURRENT, usr/src on git, howto "mergemaster"?

[Enji Cooper]

> On Jan 4, 2021, at 10:54 AM, Enji Cooper <yaneurabeya at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 4, 2021, at 10:49 AM, Marek Zarychta <zarychtam at plan-b.pwste.edu.pl <mailto:zarychtam at plan-b.pwste.edu.pl>> wrote:
> 
> …
> 
>> Terrible idea IMHO, but I am only the weak voice from the userbase.
>> 
>> It's like deprecating old, well-worn hammer in the favour of the nail
>> gun. Why not deprecate biff(1), pom(6), nvi(1) etc.?
> 
> Marek,
> 	I’m curious: have you used etcupdate before instead of mergemaster? If so when? If you ran into issues (UX as well as functional): could you please report them on bugs.freebsd.org <http://bugs.freebsd.org/> ?
> 	etcupdate is a less fragile tool that’s broken my systems less when compared with mergemaster.

That reminds me, there is a feature gap (in the last 5~10 years I’ve used etcupdate) that I forgot about between mergemaster and etcupdate: in particular, mergemaster works when adding/removing new users and groups from /etc/passwd* and /etc/group, respectively, dealing with mtree files, the last time I checked. Apart from that, I don’t see a use for mergemaster (and in which case, the feature gap can be trimmed down/migrated to etcupdate). mergemaster has broken the configuration of my machines/VMs more than etcupdate has ever and I’ve used both tools for about the same time.

Cheers,
-Enji