What we keep under /etc (was: cvs commit: src/etc rc rc.shutdown src/etc/rc.d ...)

[Eivind Eklund]

On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 01:15:53AM +0100, Brian Somers wrote:
> This makes life painful enough to ask....
> 
> Is there any good reason that mergemaster deals with this stuff rather than
> make installworld?  Or maybe I should ask, why doesn't make installworld
> handle *some* stuff in /etc, such as /etc/rc.d/ and /etc/defaults/?

In my opinion, this is a result *only* of mergemaster being broken.  A
two-way merge has significant problems for anything with two-directional
modifications.  Modifying our install policy because mergemaster is
broken is in my opinion inappropriate.  

I tried to fix mergemaster, but over a couple of years Doug never found
time to look over and accept or reject my patches, so I gave up bugging
him about it and wrote a replacement.  

That replacement is available in /usr/ports/sysutils/etcmerge.

etcmerge does not suffer from the problems of mergemaster, and I'd be
unhappy to see its users suffer because of deficiencies in mergemaster.

Eivind.