Re: RFC: etcupdate tool in base?

On Thursday 10 June 2010 4:31:08 pm Mike Jakubik wrote:
> On 6/10/2010 2:47 PM, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> > on 10/06/2010 21:29 Eitan Adler said the following:
> >    
> >> -1 unless mergemaster is replaced.
> > Have you tried etcupdate?
> > etcupdate and mergemaster have a similar function but do things in quite a
> > different way.  While one is intended to be more interactive, the other is 
more
> > automated.  They can not replace each other.
> >    
> >
> 
> -1 Also.
> 
> How does this differ from a "mergemaster -iFU" ? That's pretty much as 
> automated as it can get.

If you have a locally modified file, (e.g. enabled pam_ssh in 
/etc/pam.d/system), then mergemaster will require you to manually merge the 
changes interactively.  etcupdate will attempt to do an updated three-way 
merge similar to doing a 'cvs update' or 'svn update' and will only generate a 
conflict requiring manual resolution if the merge generates a conflict.

Also, mergemaster -iFU will always prompt the user for input if it encounters 
a conflict which is not always optimal (imagine scripting an OS upgrade for 
100's of machines).  etcupdate does not do any prompting until you run 
'etcupdate resolve' to resolve conflicts.

-- 
John Baldwin