Suggestion for dselect/dpkg...
I recently upgraded a bunch of packages on my Debian box and I had to
go though about 10-15 epsiodes of:
You already have a copy of /etc/foo.bar
N or O To keep your old copy...
Y or I To install package maintainer's version
Z To fork a shell to investigate
In *every* case, I opened a shell and ran the following:
cd /etc
diff foo.bar foo.bar.dpkg-inst | more
Now, it seems like such a standard thing to want to do, I was wondering
why this isn't already part of dpkg. Something like:
( echo "Lines unique to your original file"
echo "----------------------------------"
diff "$1" "$1.dpkg-inst" | grep "^<"
echo "Lines unique to the new file"
echo "----------------------------------"
diff "$1" "$1.dpkg-inst" | grep "^>"
) | more
----------------
On another note.... I upgraded my "base-passwd" package because a new one
came out and dselect upgraded it by default. Well, I think it's pretty
damn obvious that I'm almost never going to want to replace my established
passwd with the new one, since I'd lose all of my users and root would have
no password at all.
Basically, the way I see it, the only use in downloading the new base-passwd
package is to *add selected entries*... something that "patch" is good at
(at least, what I know about it).
So, I was wondering if anyone had given thought to employing patch to
perform some of the config file updates. Perhaps it could be used as an
extra option to the O, I, or Z choice. The user could be presented with
some sort of diff output between their original, what the patched
original would look like, and the completely new copy.
Thoughts?
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