Bug 26620

Summary:	etc-update needs a way to check if a file has been modified since install
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Justin Guenther <eniac>
Component:	[OLD] Core system	Assignee:	John Mylchreest (RETIRED) <johnm>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Justin Guenther 2003-08-14 07:09:17 UTC

etc-update currently has no way to check whether a particular configuration file 
has actually changed since it was installed.

one way to fix this would be to have etc-update check to see if a checksum of 
the old file and a checksum of the new file match.

if the md5 sums match, etc-update could automatically safely replace the old 
with the new, even if the new file contains changes.

allowances would have to be made for the RCS header information at the beginning 
of the file, et cetera, but i think that this would be an excellent feature to 
have.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. install an application (e.g. foo-0.1) => /etc/foo.conf
2. do not modify the file
3. upgrade the application, which changes the config file (e.g. foo-0.2) => 
/etc/foo.conf.net
Actual Results:  
running etc-update will still ask to merge/replace/discard the new config file 
with the old

Expected Results:  
etc-update should recognize that the old config file was unchanged since 
installation, and therefore can safely be replaced with the new config file.

Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2003-08-14 16:27:02 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 11763 ***