Re: New mergemaster option to install files that differ only by $FreeBSD

Doug Barton wrote:
> Andreas Tobler wrote:
>> Hm, then it seems to me that I did something 'wrong' when I co'ed the
>> svn repository. I am an anonymous user, aka having no svn account.
> 
> You're not using the devel/subversion-freebsd port.

> I'm glad you're happy now, but you won't be when you do your next
> mergemaster run.  :)
> 
> Mergemaster counts on there being a real version number in the VCS Id
> string to compare against and learn about new versions of files. If
> the files in your base and the files in the src tree all have
> identical strings (i.e., they are all equal to $FreeBSD$) then
> mergemaster will never know that there is a new version available.

This sounds like a problem.  I'm not sure we can
safely assume that non-committers will be using
devel/subversion-freebsd.

I've long wondered if there were some way to generically
checksum every one of these files at install time
(Maybe adding a final "#md5:XXXXXXXX" line?  Does every
file in /etc/ support "#" as a comment start?)
Then these checksums could be used to definitively
determine:
   * Files that had local edits (checksum mismatch)
   * Old files that were different from the system being installed
all without relying on VCS IDs or other conventions.
In particular, it would be really nice to be able to
say "just update everything that doesn't have local edits
and let me manually review the rest."

Tim