Bug#48717: dpkg: could be more useful wrt conffile diffs
Package: dpkg
Version: 1.4.1.18
Severity: wishlist
New dpkg proposes to show conffile diffs, which I find is a nice
feature. However, it only shows the diffs between the current
settings (conffile) and new version (conffile.dpkg-new).
When possible (ie. conffile.dpkg-dist exists), I find that 2 diffs,
one between conffile.dpkg-dist and conffile, and the other between
conffile.dpkg-dist and conffile.dpkg-new, would be more useful. That
is you will be able to look at your own changes, and at the
maintainer's changes.
As an example, when recently dealing with gdm.conf upgrade, I was able
to do:
# diff conffile.dpkg-dist conffile.dpkg-new >conffile.diff
# patch conffile <conffile.diff
(obviously, I tried "patch --dry-run" first ;)
This would advocate a copy of conffile to conffile.dpkg-dist on
install, so that the conffile mechanism can work at its best without
relying on the sysadmin to manually create the copy before editing a
conffile (which I try to always do myself, but happen to forget).
-- System Information
Debian Release: potato
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux bylbo 2.2.12 #1 Tue Oct 26 22:59:19 CEST 1999 i586
Versions of packages dpkg depends on:
ii libc6 2.1.2-6 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libncurses4 4.2-3.4 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libstdc++2.10 1:2.95.2-1 The GNU stdc++ library
Reply to: