Another tool for updating /etc

[Bakul Shah]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:08:45 EDT John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org>  wrote:
> or 'cvs up'.  If the local changes I made do not conflict, then just merge the
> changes automatically (e.g. enabling a serial console in /etc/ttys should not
> conflict with $FreeBSD$ changing when moving from 7.2 to 7.3).
> 
> To that end, I wrote a new tool that I think does a decent job of solving 
> these goals.  It does not force you to read the diffs of any files updated in
> /etc, but there are other tools available for that.  However, if you are ok 
> with reading UPDATING, commit logs, and/or release notes for that sort of 
> info, then this tool may work for you.
> 
> It also has a nice feature in that you can generate a 'diff' of your current 
> /etc tree against the "stock" tree allowing you to easily see what local 
> changes you have made.  I have already found this feature to be far more 
> useful than I first expected.
> 
> The UI is (hopefully) minimalist.  The default output looks like the output of
> 'svn up' or 'cvs up'.
> 
> If you'd like to give it a shot, you can find the script and manpage at 
> http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/etcupdate/  There is a README file that gives a 
> brief overview and instructions on how to bootstrap the needed metadata before
> the first update.  There is also an HTML version of the manpage.

Looks good!

But I wonder... why not build something like this around cvs?
Basically a three way merge is exactly what we want for /etc,
right?  cvs because it is in the base system.  I used to
maintain /etc changes in cvs and that was useful in keeping
track of configuration changes on shared machines.