Re: ntpd as ntpd user question

On Mon, 2018-07-23 at 18:54 -0700, bob prohaska wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 09:34:26PM +0200, Herbert J. Skuhra wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Yes, first you press m. Then you will see differences of installed
> > file (left) and new file (right). Then you press either l or
> > r:
> > 
> > l | 1:	choose left diff
> > r | 2:	choose right diff
> > 
> > If the diff tries to remove/add to many lines you can:
> > 
> > el:	edit left diff
> > er:	edit right diff
> > 
> > And if done you can view the merged file (v) before installing (i)
> > it.
> > 
> > I am sure, someone can explain it better! :)
> > 
> Perhaps, but you've made the essential point. Your reply let me
> understand that 
> mergemaster does not really "master" the merge, it rather identifies
> files needing 
> to be merged and then starts sdiff to let me modify files. Never
> having even looked 
> at sdiff, the learning curve proved very steep. Too steep, in fact.
> 
> I'm going to try a more incremental approach. 
> 
> Thank you _very_ much!
> 
> bob prohaska

Your reaction to mergemaster is about the same as mine was when I first
encountered it very long ago, and re-discovered when I tried it a
couple years ago. It just seems like more trouble than it's worth, I
can usually figure out what's broken and fix it by hand faster than
messing with all the merge stuff.

But, someone told me that if you give mergemaster the right flags it
can potentially be intervention-free. Those apparently aren't the flag
or two that're suggested at the bottom of UPDATING. So I didn't really
dig into that any deeper, but I toss it out there in case someone can
expand on it.

It certainly makes some sense that it could be done intervention-free.
When doing other diff-based merges (like 'svn update') you only have to
intervene when there's an actual conflict between some local change
you've made and the incoming changes.

-- Ian