> 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.
This is the core of the problem. You're asking for specialized treatment for fstab. It might be doable. OK, so that goes in, and the next question is, what about rc.conf, and modules.d/alsa, and, and, and... Someone else pointed out that there is no standard format to config files in Unix. That's why this question is not easily, maybe at all, solvable. Maybe with some sort of plugin architecture, where each package supplies its own config updater for etc-update to run. But inevitably those updaters are going to have bugs. So people will have to check their configs after they're updated, and really, how much more time does it take to merge them by hand than just checking whether the merge was done correctly? > > 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. Sorry, this was my poor attempt to address half a dozen posts without responding to each of them--it wasn't really directed at you. > 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. This is exactly what "merge interactively" does. I think it's option 3 once you've selected a file to update. Someone else posted a more detailed explanation. I think the real problem that this has pointed out is that people expect etc-update to update config files for you. It doesn't. It doesn't even *try*. Used to be that Portage just printed something like: "There are config files to be updated! use find -name .__cfg* to find them." Well, people weren't too happy with that. Surprise. So someone wrote etc-update, which basically did the find for you and gave you a couple options on how to handle the new one--delete the update, blindly accept the changes, or merge them with a diff command. But etc-update was in gentoolkit, and newbies never found it. And then they posted annoying messages to lists and groups about how stupid having to find config files manually was. So etc-update was moved into the portage package, and the help message was updated to mention it instead. So that brings us to today, where we have messages (these are the most recent in a long series of how -5 clobbered my system) about how stupid etc-update is. Well, yeah. It's not supposed to be smart. You're supposed to be. But OTOH, I'd say that it's sort of a documentation bug that this isn't explained very clearly anywhere, and I guess "auto-merge" is not obviously synonymous with "DESTROY YOUR CONFIG FILES!! BAHAHAHAHAH!!'. Maybe someone should write a config file manual for the user docs section. But there's not anything wrong with etc-update, just with people's understanding of how it should be used. Hope that clears things up. -Heschi (PS: Mark: I may write angry-sounding emails, but generally that's just my style. If I'm really frustrated I don't write anything at all. No hard feelings on my side--I wrote because I thought your points, and other people's, were worth addressing.) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
