On Wed, 30 May 2012, Chris Knadle wrote:
The main thing I have not liked about Red Hat / Fedora are issues concerning
how RPMs deal with upgraing config files that are part of packages.
Traditionally if there's a newer config file, the new file is silently dropped
next to the old one and the service is restarted using the /old/ config file,
IIRC.
Yes, and I think that's the right thing to do. If you have edited that
file then you don't want your changes wiped out. And you don't
necessarily want to have to go through all the changes right now during
the install. So the new file is put in place with .rpmnew added on, and
you then have to go through and resolve the differences manually.
Occasionally there are major changes to the program the config file is
for which mandates changes to the config to get the program to work, so
restarting the service with the old config fails or the service starts and
ends up being misconfigured.
Yes, but it would be equally bad to just plop in a new config file and
disregard your previous customizations.
Distributions based on .deb packages /ask/ concerning what to do with major
config file changes /before/ restarting the service, and that gives an admin
an opportunity to break out to a shell to merge required changes.
It would be nice if rpm could flag a config file as major/minor changes,
but you'd still need to merge the newer version with your old
configuration. And major format changes are less frequent than upgrading
a package to a version that still knows the old format.
And each config file has a different format, so you really have to
know what you are doing for each to get it right. (Often you just move
the .rpmnew file into place over the old one, maybe after editing a couple
of lines, but not always.)
It would also be nice to have a tool to help you resolve all the .rpmnew
changes, but it's not clear what it would do. You need to find
them, with something like:
find /etc -name "*.rpmnew" -print
Then you may want to diff the .rpmnew version with the existing file.
If the differences are small it's easy to merge them. If not, you have to
spend some time figuring it out. Is there something for .deb packages
that makes this part easier?
-Eric
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