Re: experimental conffile merge for dpkg
On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 03:40:33AM +0300, Jarno Elonen wrote:
> http://elonen.iki.fi/code/dpkg-merge/ contains the patched dpkg
> and a new interactive python & curses based two-way merge tool
> called imediff2 (+ 3 screenshots for the impatient).
Why two-way merge instead of three-way?
The problem with the traditional two way merge is that it is impossible
to distinguish what changes have been made locally vs what changes have
been made upstream. So I am often left wondering: Is this an important
change I made? Or is this a critical change upstream made?
Typically, when resolving conflicts in conffiles while updating
packages, I would like to do one of the following (depending on where
the most changes are) manually or semi-automatically:
1. get the diff of all local changes, and apply them to the new upstream
version. This would be idea if few local changes have been made, and
would work (manually at least) even if large changes have been made to
the upstream.
2. get the diff of all upstream changes, and apply then to the local
version. This would be best of the local version has big changes, but
the upstream version doesn't change much.
Unfortunately neither is currently possible at the moment, simply
because dpkg doesn't save a copy of the last installed config file
anywhere.
(Note: I use upstream here to mean either the upstream author
or the Debian package maintainer).
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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