Re: Debian Woody -> Sarge upgrade report
Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
<things about his woody-to-sarge transition>
I have made this transition a lot lately, too, and I would like to offer
some insight about the following process:
2. The standard yes, no, diff, shell approach could probably use
some tweaking. What I mean is that with so many config files being
updated, there should be an option to "manually merge now." This
can be done in one of a couple of ways. A text editor could be
opened with both the current and proposed config loaded (e.g., vim
and emacs), or a single file could be presented with the diff'd
In my experience, I almost always hit D (show differences), select the
configfile name, :!vimdiff configfile(pasted from clipboard)
configfile(idem).dpkg-new, do the merging, :diffupdate, :wq, hit D
again, repeat if not satisfied, and then hit N (keep mine). In a
woody-to-sarge dist-upgrade, this *really* hurts my wrists.
What I would like is an option A (automerge) that did a 3-way merge of
configfile and configfile.dpkg-new, open an editor in the conflict
markers, let you edit the conflicts out, and when you save/exit, showed
you the differences between your new configfile and configfile.dpkg-new,
and asked again.
portions inserted and marked in the complete file (e.g., editors that
only support one open file). I think that this can be done by
shelling out (with the Z option), but I am never really sure if my
changes will stick. The option says "shell to examine the situation",
or something to that effect. There is no indication that if I change
the config, the change will stick.
Yeah, I feel unsafe, altough I *know* whatever I save in the configfile
will stick.
Also, some packages should adopt the policy of including a "local"
snippet. What I mean is, for example, with the dhcpd package, or any
package that "requires" a change to the config immediately after
installation. Simply put, a dhcpd config will always need to be
modified to tell which net, subnet mask, hostnames, MACs, and so on,
it needs to handle. It is annoying when the messages throughout the
file change and cause the admin to have to intervene in the process
by choosing what to do. Some packages (e.g., horde2) have a config
in /etc/<pkg-name> with a standard <pkg-name>.conf and then somewhere
in the .conf file they source or include a snippet with the local
changes. I encourage the maintainers of such packages (dhcpd and
ntp, come to mind immediately) to consider this approach.
I really agree with this.
<more stuff>
HTH,
Massa
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