Advice sought on upgrading from 4.11-R to 5.4...

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:15 PM -0700 2005-09-28, Doug Barton wrote:

>  Ah, I misread the original message. Usually people are complaining about the
>  CVS Ids in the comments, as opposed to the comments themselves.

	The CVS Ids are part of the issue, yes.  But not the whole problem.

>  I disagree that ignoring comments in the files is a good idea. There is no
>  way for mergemaster to know for sure if the comment is material or not,
>  that's the admin's job.

	Which is why I was hoping to be able to have a command-line 
option to control this function.

>  Upgrading across a major version is a difficult task, no matter how its
>  approached. IIRC, the original example was upgrading from 4.x to 5.x, which,
>  like most major version upgrades, should be done by backing up your data and
>  doing a fresh install anyway. This is particularly important over the 4 -> 5
>  change, since by upgrading from source you're missing the UFS2 update.

	In my case, I don't want the UFS2 update.  I have not been able 
to get FreeBSD-5.x CD-ROMs that are bootable on my machine, so I am 
forced to do a software upgrade.  Moreover, I want to make sure that 
the filesystem remains readable to FreeBSD-4.x bootable CD-ROMs -- 
just in case there is a disaster.

	I saw all the comments that were pointed out by mergemaster, and 
many of them seemed to be mere changes in whitespace (could we at 
least automatically apply those?), some were correcting a minor typo, 
and there were a few that were a bit more extensive -- spread over a 
couple of lines or more.  But every single one of them was relatively 
minor and I would have been very happy to have all of them 
automatically applied.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.