From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 19 09:05:40 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3A99116A4CE for ; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:05:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from internet.potentialtech.com (h-66-167-251-6.PHLAPAFG.covad.net [66.167.251.6]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AC90543D54 for ; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:05:38 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com (pa-plum-cmts1e-68-68-113-33.pittpa.adelphia.net [68.68.113.33]) by internet.potentialtech.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 866F169A25; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 12:05:37 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <400C0E5F.5010606@potentialtech.com> Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 12:05:35 -0500 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031005 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: rihad References: <400C012E.4040002@mail.ru> In-Reply-To: <400C012E.4040002@mail.ru> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: question on mergemaster X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 17:05:40 -0000 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 Comments? -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com