improving rpm

[Rudolf Kastl]

2006/7/14, Till Maas <opensource at till.name>:
> Am Mittwoch, 12. Juli 2006 22:32 schrieb Nicolas Mailhot:
> > Le mercredi 12 juillet 2006 à 21:12 +0100, Cam a écrit :
>
> > > I think it's an interesting idea. What's the harm in offering the user
> > > the choice between new config, old config, merged changes?
> >
> > rpm is designed to run unattended
> >
> > If you want to have a small idea of what "patching conf files" really
> > means I invite you to read the dejavu rpm spec. And I'm only doing small
> > changes on a conf file with very few verbs, stable grammar, no
> > interactions between conf directives, and structured content.
>
> rpm could just behave the same way as before but also create an .rpmmerged
> file if the old and new config file are different. This way one can inspect
> the .rpmmerged file and fix it, move it to actuall config file or discard it.
> Nevertheless it can make an update easier in many cases where only simple
> changes in the config file were performed by the user. Maybe after some time
> we get some experience how good this merging works and use it automatically.
>
> Regards,
> Till
>
>
>
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a few years ago i have packaged a solution for this called etc-update
with rpm support on newrpms.sunsite.dk.
you may want to look for the etc-update src rpm there...

basically its nothing but a script that prompts you for merging all of
those updated config files with the user modified ones.

the merge utility can be freely configured (i prefer meld personally
but thats not a solution for cli monkeys)

regards,
Rudolf Kastl