I was not suggesting that manual config changes be prevented. I was suggesting that they be generally discouraged. For the desktop users, there is a graphical (or even possibly curses-driven) configuration tool that should be preferred (indeed, it should be made so user-friendly that no one questions it). However, this approach is there ONLY as a means to boost our accuracy when merging config files. It is NOT the solution.
The GENERAL solution to merging config files should very intelligently handle manual config changes. There is a huge amount of commonality in basic syntax between different program's config file formats. Even when they're not all that similar, most of them have one option per line. The point is that there are valid generalizations we can make about how to handle merges. I didn't mention that I'm a graduate student at Ohio State majoring in AI, specifically knowledge-based reasoning. Compared to natural language processing, this kind of low-level symbol-pushing is a piece of cake. Of course, AI often involves a lot of guessing based on probabilities and most likely hypotheses. I'm not suggesting that we do any guessing here. I honestly think that, given the appropriate inputs, I could develop a program to merge config files automatically and correctly most of the time. And be able to know when to get help from the user for the rest of the cases. -- Meta-bug: Package upgrades don't automagically merge config file changes https://launchpad.net/bugs/69412 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
