About mergemaster (Re: upgrading)

[Richard Coleman]

>>far as I can see from the PR database.  The mergemaster author didn't
>>especially like the idea, because he thinks people ought to know how
>>their computers are configured.
>>
>>I'll be happy to take a look at your patches when you get it working.
> 
> The only problem with this theory is a significant number of the files flagged 
> by mergemaster, the only difference is the cvs version tag (in theory, this 
> shouldn't be happening, since the cvs tag shouldn't update unless something 
> in the file changes, but I have seen this nonetheless.  Somewhat along the 
> same lines are files where the only changes are changes to typos in comments, 
> or adding/deleting comments, which have no functional difference on the file 
> itself.). 

I've been thinking about a simple, brute force solution.  Just add a new 
switch to mergemaster to automatically merge, and then have an 
"exception list".

For instance, say "mergemaster -A" is the command to automatically 
merge.  It could easily do an automatic merge for all files except for a 
given list:

donotmerge="/etc/rc.conf /etc/hosts /etc/passwd /etc/group"

If a file in this list has changed, then mergemaster would drop into the 
interactive mode like it current does".  As I configure a server, I 
would just add any file I manually edit to this list.  Although not 
perfect, it would handle 90% of the cases.

Richard Coleman
richardcoleman at mindspring.com