Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge xfree-4.3.0-r3 2. run etc-update 3. etc-update thinks /etc/X11/chooser (a binary file) is a config file 4. try to interactively merge original with update Actual Results: BAM! Expected Results: /etc/X11/chooser replaced automatically
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 17268 ***
no, spanky, it's not! bug #17268 is about etc-update is not able to deal with *binary config files* (shudder) and is assigned to dev-portage this bug is about /etc/X11/xdm/chooser, which is a compiled c programm and should be assigned to xfree. feeding binary programs to etc-update doens't make the least bit of sense! could you please reopen and assign to the proper people? thanks
there's a bug somewhere that deals with this, but i cant find it atm
ok, I see 3 options to solve this: - add a CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK entry for this file - install it in a different location - generally don't protect binary stuff (how can we check if a file is binary ?)
run `file` on the file and see if it says it's data or a binary or something
The things that `file ...` can output are problematic in fact. For instance, a shell script is displayed as "application/x-shellscript", which doesn't show it is a "text" file at the first look. And it is probably not possible to maintain an exhaustive list of such text-like types into portage, it would be too error prone (and ugly also). There was a discussion on this topic on the python list a few months ago: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-August/177961.html One of the point in that discussion is that it is difficult to know what are "printable" characters of a files when you don't know its encoding. And assuming config files are ASCII only would be wrong: there are more and more UTF8 files coming from Gnome/KDE for instance. Hence, one of the suggestions in this thread is to recognize as "binary" those files that contains "\0" chars. This is easy and safe, but may fail to detect some of the binaries files. Anyway, it would be better than nothing.
if you run `file` on a shell script it should save something like 'Bourne-Again shell script text executable' ... if it gives you a mime type, you probably ran `file` with the -i option the man page for file refers to the fact that all text files usually contain the word 'text' in their output ... rather than worrying about a portage solution we could always tell xfree to 'fix' their end
Now that I've re-read "file" manpage, and that I've also read in FHS that their should be _no_ binary file in /etc (I was not sure about this at all, I was thinking it was more like this because no binaries were needed in general), I can only fully agree with you SpanKY. Sorry for the noise.
well, for the most part, the files arent technically in /etc the directories are symlinked in ;)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 14321 ***
*** Bug 136376 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
