On Friday 05 December 2008, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote about 'Re: Erase cache, clean registry in Linux': >> Q: How are we going to do that? >> A: It's not possible in general. > >Of course it is, since you can always fall back on the current code in >those cases where you don't know how else to do it. No, it's not. Falling back to the old behavior (not merging changes) is not a technique for automatically merging local changes to conffiles. It is refusing to solve the problem, not a solution to the problem. >> When something is impossible, it's impractical to think about how it >> would be done. > >Solving NP-hard problems in a reasonable amount of time is considered >(currently and maybe for ever) impossible in general. Yet, people write >programs that do that every day. No, they don't. Instead, they make take the general problem and make it more specific through a set of assumptions. This altered problem is no longer NP-hard. The provided solution no longer solves the problem in general. Alternatively, they make successive approximations of the solution and stop when the approximation is "good enough", never actually, exactly solving the problem. >> Ex-Gentoo user; didn't like the configuration file update command >> dumping gconf files through less. I imagine diff3 would be quite a bit >> worse. > >Right now, dpkg dumps you a "diff" output. No, it doesn't. Right now, dpkg asks if I want my copy or the maintainers copy or a diff or a shell (and maybe a few other options). This is quite sufficient, and a shade or two better than the Gentoo solution. Next time, try and make at least one of your assertions true. :P ;) Seriously, if you think it can be done, show us the patch. I'm completely willing to generate test cases that will break it with the goal of improving it. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss03@volumehost.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/
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