edit patches in dpkg configuration file dialog
Hi,
what about the following idea.
If a configuration file is marked as conffile in a package
you have the possibility to select between:
- Install the new version of the configuration file from the
package
- Keep your current installed version of the file
- View the differences
This is imho pretty suboptimal because even if you see the
differences between the files and install a new version or
keep the old version you always have the problem that you
might miss new configuration flags or you have to adapt the
new file manually from your old backup and "merge" the
changes.
What about the possibility to view the patch, edit it with
your favorite editor and the just apply the patch?
This way you don't have to do all the manual stuff after
installing the packages and you don't miss new configuration
flags.
Are there already people who started to do something
similar? Do you think this is useful?
The problem is obvious, you can't just edit a patch in an
editor if you want it to apply cleanly after editing it.
The patchutils package has the editpatch tool to edit
patches and it basically opens an editor and calls rediff
afterwards to fix the broken ranges of the diff.
I guess it would be a bad idea to depend on patchutils in
dpkg so that would be ~1000 LOC C extra for rediff in dpkg.
What do you think?
Kind regards
Nico
--
Nico Golde - http://www.ngolde.de
JAB: nion@jabber.ccc.de - GPG: 0x73647CFF
Forget about that mouse with 3/4/5 buttons,
gimme a keyboard with 103/104/105 keys!
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