Re: edit patches in dpkg configuration file dialog

[Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net>]

sean finney <seanius@debian.org> writes:

> On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 19:23 +0100, Nico Golde wrote:
>> 
>> The implementation was not really difficult, the patch file 
>> itself is 200 lines alltogether.
>
> not bad :) i have to admit i haven't looked at the patch.
>
>> > would be to see the differences between the new maintainer conffile and
>> > the previous version of the maintainer conffile.
>> > 
>> > to implement this, one would simply need to keep a copy of
>> > dpkg-installed conffiles in some directory hierarchy under /var/lib/dpkg
>> > and provide a new option to diff this old version against the
>> > newly-unpacked-but-not-installed version of the conffile.

Although this clutters up /etc they could be saved as *.dpkg-last or
so.  New packages' conffiles can be saved as *.dpkg-new just like dpkg
currently does if one chooses not to install the new file.  Before a
new version is installed *.dpkg-new would be renamed to *.dpkg-last.

>> I am not sure if I get your idea 100% correctly but what 
>> about the user changes if you just look at the old and the 
>> new maintainer version of the config file?
>
> this wouldn't be for merging or anything, simply seing what the cause of
> the prompt was in the first place.

Of course you need this for merging.  You need to make a diff between
the old and new maintainer versions and then you can apply the
resulting patch to the user's version of the conffile.  Any conflicts
then need to be resolved.

Matthias