On Fri, 27 Jun 2014 17:42:40 +0100 Alan Barrett wrote: > It is intended to ask you about every single file, and if you > just hit ENTER instead of giving an answer, it is designed to > leave the file alone. It is NEVER supposed to overwrite a file > without your explicit permision. Once again, if it's not working > as designed, them please file a detailed bug report; these vague > messages about "wants to destroy" and "vengeful" do not provide > any of the detailed information that would be required to fix any > such bugs, if they exist.
While phrasing of original message could be better, if I guess intent correctly, design quoted above (asking about every file) is part of the problem. Without extra flags, user gets asked many times to make decisions about replacing files (IIRC most of which you actually do want to replace), with few especially critical files mixed in without any extra warnings. This offers more opportunities for mistakes than necessary. -a and -l make this much better. Now that I think about it, I do wonder why they are not used as defaults. I can see how seeing everything could potentially be useful, but I suspect wanting effects of those flags might be more common than not wanting them. Importantly, anyone relying on the NetBSD Guide (33.1.4, 33.1.5) is told to use "/usr/sbin/etcupdate -s /usr/src". Adding -a and -l there might possibly be good. It's been a while since I used etcupdate but if ENTER currently basically means "change nothing", another possible improvement could be to try to adjust question by question default action ENTER gives, for example by same logic as -a and -l use.
