I just finished a --update world and am looking at 24 config files that were protected. As I work through these I am noticing that most of these are just the stock config files that I modified slightly when I first installed Gentoo. How about requesting a tag in the ebuilds that identifies when a config file format has changed. If the format has changed, the ebuild can simply assign the old config file to the new package. If the format has changed then the original config file gets protected. For some files related to system cofiguration it may be good to replace areas of the files with bash variables or some more complex way of preserving particular sets of settings between package versions.
*** Bug 25058 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This adds too much complexity IMHO, for something that do not happen _that_ often, and usually is less than a minute to sort out. If anything, I think just integrating the 'automerge' feature of etc-update might be a better idea of trying to keep the count down (IMHO of course).
It doesn't matter to me too much how it happens. The end result should be that files in /etc aren't updated unless there are _substantive_ changes to them, not just the updated cvs comment at the top of the file, and not to fix misspellings like 'of'->'off'. From what I can tell, it does happen often; most of the updates that I usually see would fall under the category of 'unecessary'. Many of them don't affect me because they are updates for files I never touched, but that's not going to be true of everyone.
Anything that is comment (starts with #) or spaces/newlines should be automatically merged. I think that emerge should do that and not etc-update/dispatch since there is no real change to the config file, the count gets unimportant (only comment updates) Also it happens that we have binary files protected. Like if someone is gonna tweak a *binary* file :) theses shouldn't be protected and automatically merged too, imho (something wrong with it ?)
the ability to auto merge whitespaces and comments is an option you can set review /etc/dispatch-conf.conf
There are also important files such as /etc/fstab that you "NEED" to change for your system. They are currently updated periodically and an accidental overwrite could be a big problem, especially for a newer user. If these files are either marked somehow, or if they can be put into a single directory that is protected and perhapse simlinked to the original location, that would avoid this problem. These files should only be updated when the format for the config file has changed.
Hi! I am confused because of seeing so many patches and improvement ideas of etc-update. But I would like to tell that I think the current way of merging new config files with the old ones is quite cumbersome. Much more could be done automatically. There are many "bug reports" here with many ideas, some of them already more than two years old. I would be happy to see one of them incorporated into portage. BG
dispatch-conf has auto-merging of whitespace and comments as well as three way merging.
