>Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 19:06:24 -0400
>From: John Von Essen <john@essenz.com>
>To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
>Subject: mergemaster -i
>I do alot of stable upgrades and as a result I spend alot of time with
>mergemaster. My changes in etc are minimal, so I rather wipe out my
>existing /etc (except for machine specific files like fstab, and so on)
>and have mergemaster install everything from /usr/src/etc. This way I
>don't have to spend time going through all the diffs.
I track -STABLE daily on a couple of machines, and every couple of weeks
(or so) on a couple of others. On the first set of machines, I also
track -CURRENT on a daily basis. Thus, I also run mergemaster fairly
frequently.
That said, I am perplexed by your stated solution to what appears to me
to be a non-problem.
>I have found that there is no quick and easy way of doing this. What I
>have been doing is deleting everything in /etc except for certain
>files, then running mergemaster -i. Any thoughts?
I created the file /etc/mergemaster.rc in each of the machines. The
only non-comment entry I have in it is
IGNORE_MOTD=yes
and for the rest, I had created an alias for the "make buildworld"
(&
friends); the first invocation of mergemaster (prior to installworld) is
"mergemaster -u 0022 -p"; the second (after installworld) is
"mergemaster -u 0022 -i".
Usually, mergemaster finds that all of the FreeBSD Ids are the same, so it
presents me with no diffs.
For the few files I have that I do change, I merge the differences,
taking care to ensure that the FreeBSD Ids are updated to reflect the
merge.
And the reason for the use of both the /etc/mergemaster.rc file and the
command-line flags is merely my laziness: originally, I had not created
the file, and merely relied on the alias to "do the right thing" with
respect to the command-line options. A couple of weeks ago, I finally
got a little tired of telling mergemaster to blow away the old /etc/motd
every time, looked at the man page, saw I could do that with the file,
and did so.
I suppose I could spend about 1/4 the effort I spent in writiing this to
update the /etc/mergemaster.rc files so that the pre-installworld
mergemaster invocation becomes merely "mergemaster -p", while the
post-
installworld invocation becomes merely "mergemaster". :-}
Even so, I am not seeing the problem that you are apparently seeing.
(I note in passing that I do all of the "make buildworld" &
friends
stuff, including mergemaster, within "script" so I retain a record of
what happened. Thus, I could extract a transcript of a recent
"mergemaster" run to send you out-of-band with respect to this mailing
list, should you want such a thing.)
Peace,
david
--
David H. Wolfskill david@catwhisker.org
Based on what I have seen to date, the use of Microsoft products is not
consistent with reliability. I recommend FreeBSD for reliable systems.