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Re: dpkg musings



> * beter conffile handling
>
>   I already have this pretty much all implemented based on the proposal
>   on www.dpkg.org. It needs a better 3-way diff function (it calls
>   diff3 in a bad manner right now) and needs interpreter bindings
>   so it can replace ucf, but the basis is pretty much there.

The merge, however, can't be fully automatic. Here are some thoughts on merge2 
vs. merge3 issue from #120152:

 Personally, I not sure anymore if it would really be worth it - you would 
 still have to check each hunk manually because even a non-conflicting 
 automatic merge can quite easily break the semantics of a configuration file. 
 For example, adding a path field in the middle of a file could work fine with 
 the defaults but might unintentionally override the values a user had 
 specified earlier on the first line.

Also, if you decide to use 3-way merge, do you know if there are any easy 
terminal based tools for checking the results?. If not, I could write a 3-way 
version of the imediff2 program I made for the 2-way case.

- Jarno



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