Re: hardcoded -C argument to ${INSTALL}

On Tue May 06, 2003 at 09:26:45PM -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> <<On Tue, 6 May 2003 20:09:49 -0400, Garance A Drosihn <drosih_at_rpi.edu> said:
> 
> > I think this "remove stale pieces" issue is one that we have
> > to find a decent solution to, because it keeps popping up
> > every few months (in slightly different contexts), and it's
> > going to drive us all nuts.
> 
> ...which is odd because releases have come with mtree files for quite
> a few years now, and they contain all the information necessary to
> compute the set difference between two arbitrary releases. 

Not quite. If you're talking about the /etc/mtree files, they only
deal with directories.

> It wouldn't take too much programming to add a flag to mtree(8)
> which implements the `read the spec file and output a list of files
> which ought to be present' function, and then all you need is
> sort(1) and comm(1) to determine which files went away for any pair
> of releases since the mtree files started being distributed (which
> includes all the ones that matter).  Of course, you could just use
> `mtree' to delete the old files for you, but you have to be very
> careful when doing that not to delete the user's files, too.

Well, I think mtree already does that:

DESCRIPTION
     The mtree utility compares the file hierarchy rooted in the current
     directory against a specification read from the standard input.  Messages
     are written to the standard output for any files whose characteristics do
     not match the specifications, or which are missing from either the file
     hierarchy or the specification.

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