Re: RFC: dpkg-conffile cmdline interface draft

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

sean finney <seanius@debian.org> writes:

> hi again,
>
> On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 01:38:39PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> In the thread to your patch series for conffile tracking I saw
>> mentioned that you have:
>> 
>> - current conffile
>> - old orig conffile
>> - new orig conffile
>> - last successfully installed conffile
>
> the current and "old orig" are the only ones that are generally available
> on a system when the package isn't being upgraded (i.e. at the end of
> package configuration "new" replaces "old").

I was thinking of cases where an upgrade fails or one chooses to fork
a shell to merge conffile changes.

Then it might be usefull to see the differences between the old/new to
see what needs to be added to the current one. Or between last/current
to see what one has already added or what a merge attempt managed to
do already. and so on.

>> Shouldn't one be able to get diffs between basically any 2 of them as
>> far as they exist at the time?
>
> in my next rebased branch there's also a "base" version which is the
> "last successfully installed" conffile, though i'm beginning to wonder
> about the usefulness of this extra copy in practice.  but regardless,
> we could add another cmdline option which influences the src/dst diff
> selections (-D {origdiff|distdiff|basediff|...}) if it were considered to
> be generally useful.
>
>
> 	sean

I think it would be usefull when doing automatic merges. When the
merge goes wrong one might want to revert to the last conffile and
then merge by hand. "last" might just mean saving the current conffile
before altering it and deleting "last" when the upgrade was
successfull.

MfG
        Goswin