Re: question on mergemaster

Bill Moran wrote:

> rihad wrote:
>
>> Hi. I was wondering if there are any improvements planned to be made to
>> mergemaster? After today's cvsup I had to sit and keep pressing either
>> "q" (to break out of the pager) or "i" to accept the new file. This *is*
>> boring, considering there seemed to be no end to them and I eventually
>> killed mergemaster, because I had started to get nervous and make silly
>> typos :). It's just my toy home machine and there's only few files under
>> /etc that I care about, and these mergemaster doesn't touch anyway (like
>> fstab, rc.conf etc). Wouldn't it be great if one could add the "assume
>> yes" flag so that it overwrites without prompting (like gentoo's
>> etc-update does when you ask it). Currently I came up with this dirty
>> hack to save myself from hundreds of confirmations, it kind of worked:
>>
>> # ( echo d; while :; do echo -e "q\ni"; done ) | mergemaster -i
>>
>> Is such an "no-prompt" option considered important enough to be
>> integrated RSN or am I missing some obvious and convenient usage pattern
>> everyone know about?
>>
>> Thanks in advance and sorry if this is a bit offtopic.
>
>
> I'm going to chime in because this has hung over my head for a while.
>
> I've considered writing and submitting a patch to mergemaster to do this
> since the first time I used it.  The biggest problem with lookin at
> _every_ file is that it makes the user more prone to error as the tedium
> bores him.  Obviously, a switch the simply updates everything is
> pretty much guaranteed to screw somebody! so that's not a good idea
> either.
>
> But I just thought of a potential improvement, and I thought I'd suggest
> this to everyone and see what they think:
>
> If mergemaster checked each file for a magic value, such as:
> # mergemaster autoreplace
> and automatically updated those files without prompting the user, then
> users could add such a line to the beginning of each file in /etc that
> they are comfortable updating without feedback.  It may seem like a lot
> of work, but it's only done _once_ (although mergemaster would need to
> be taught to preserve this magic when it updates the file)
>
> The optimistic way to do this would be to have some sort of switch to
> mergemaster to tell it to go into autoupdate mode, and it will only ask
> for files that contain a "negative magic" like:
> # mergemaster noautoreplace
> In which case the administrator should put this string at the beginning
> of every file that he tweaks in /etc


I like the optimistic approach.. Should some files have this in by 
default?  Like rc.conf?
How about a few other options, like:
# mergemaster neverreplace
For files that should never be touched (in my case, printcap)

Eric


-- 
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Eric Anderson	   Systems Administrator      Centaur Technology
All generalizations are false, including this one.
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