On Sun, 2003-08-03 at 10:56, Heschi Kreinick wrote: > > > How do I recognize "trivial" changes? Only upt to 3 lines affected? > > > Then there are no trivial changes;-) > > > > There aren't any trivial changes! If a 1-line change can bring your > > machine down, then EVERY single line must be chacked with the greatest > > of care. > > Spoken like someone who recently installed gentoo, and never had to look at > a bunch of files where the only thing that had changed was the CVS header. > I'm quite pleased with the automerging support.
Oh, completely true!! I admit that I am not a programmer, and I actually think the world would be better if I never had to look at a CVS header file! ;-) > > > > Quite often I get confused which side is old (left?) and new, > > > respectively. > > > > My problem too! > > Then use a different diff command. You can change it in etc-update.conf. This presumes that I have enough background to: 1) Know that it can be changed 2) Know what some options are 3) Feel confident that the change won't somehow cause the whole thing to break my machine. I fail on all three counts! ;-) ;-) > I > don't have any suggestions but there have to be more out there. > To the person who said -5 is useless, I disagree that. I agree. I've only modified just a couple of files by hand, so I look for those, use -3 on them, and then use -5 on everything that's left. > Every time I do an > upgrade of XFree there's a buch of X config files modified that I don't care > about. I merge the files I've modified, then -5 the rest of them. > To the person (people) who think /etc/fstab never changes, older versions of > baselayout required tmpfs mounted at /mnt/.init.d/ . New versions (maybe not > in stable yet) don't. How do you suggest those changes get pointed out to > the user? I agree completely that fstab needs at times, like recently, to be updated. However, for all the smart tools around here, I think it amazingly dense that etc-update -5 will replace a working partition number like /dev/hda6 with something like /dev/boot! It certainly should be able to find out which partitions I'm using for which purpose: /dev/hda6 /boot ext3 noauto,noatime 1 1 It requires me to remember which partition is which. Possibly fine for programmers and hardware techs, but not so nice for users. > You're complaining Nothing I said was intended to be a complaint, so much as a statement that some of us find this part of the tools less refined than much of the Gentoo system. I'm not a programmer, don't have a real clue how to make it better. Sorry if it sounded negative. It wasn't meant to. How else could I express this desire to see this part of Gentoo get better? > that the automated tools don't do what you want them > to--and now people are suggesting that fstab get run through *sed*?? I don't know 'sed' and didn't suggest anything about it, even though I know you're just making an example. > Sounds > like a recipe for disaster to me. If you don't like etc-update, edit the > files manually. If you have a concrete suggestion for improving etc-update, > feel free to say something. Etc-update is by no means perfect, but I don't > see an obvious way to improve it. Nor I really. I just think that throwing away user edits to fstab because possibly etc-update want to change a comment in the file is radical. I do think that some sort of editor that would show the changes side by side would be an improvement, but I don't know what tools would do that today. > You might try the menu-based mode, which > has been in development for quite some time. That will, at least, fix the > "too many files to fit on the screen" problem. > -Heschi Heschi, You've been very helpful in the past, and I know you will continue to be. Sorry if I sounded like I'm picking on this stuff. It's not my intention. I've had etc-update break my machine twice. I'm learning to be more careful. I'd like fewer people in the future to have these problems. With best regards, Mark -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
