There has to be a better way of merging /etc during a major freebsd-update

[Peter Olsson]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 06:58:07AM -0700, Chris H wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Mar 2015 13:05:40 +0100 Peter Olsson <list-freebsd-stable at jyborn.se>
> wrote
> 
> > This flag to mergemaster saved a lot of work when I did
> > upgrades the old way, with cvsup and the make steps and
> > then mergemaster:
> > "
> > # Install the new file if it differs only by VCS Id ($FreeBSD)
> > FREEBSD_ID=yes
> > "
> > Is there some equivalent to this flag in freebsd-update/merge?
> Hello, Peter.
> This has probably been answered by now. But just in case.
> I believe what you're looking for is:
> mergemaster -vF

Yes, that would probably solve my problem. Can I just
change this line in /etc/freebsd-update.conf:

MergeChanges /etc/ /var/named/etc/ /boot/device.hints

to this:

MergeChanges /var/named/etc/ /boot/device.hints

And run mergemaster after the first freebsd-update install,
before I reboot?

Thanks!

Peter Olsson
 
> This is my [chosen] default. I also find it helpful,
> as a "safety net" to
> cp _Rp /etc /eetc
> 
> prior to the mergemaster(8) step.
> 
> On a related note. I'm not very fond of mergemaster. As
> a result, I recently took on maintaining
> sysutils/etcmerge. sysutils/etcupdate, is also a
> [mergemaster] related port.
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
> --Chris
> > 
> > I just did my first major upgrade (8.4-RELEASE-p24 ->
> > 9.3-RELEASE-p10) with freebsd-update. It took more than
> > an hour of manual keyboard activity, most of which could
> > probably be done automatically. (And here I thought that
> > computers were supposed to free us from tedious routine
> > work...)
> > 
> > First robotically pressing dd..j.ZZ in a lot of files.
> > Occasionally combined with /<<< to find more places that
> > needed changing in files that didn't fit in the screen.
> > Eg sendmail.cf.
> > 
> > Of all these files that needed manual editing I had made
> > my own changes in only one file (/etc/hosts), the rest of
> > them just had this kind of change:
> > 
> > The following file could not be merged automatically: /etc/rc.d/nisdomain
> > Press Enter to edit this file in vi and resolve the conflicts
> > manually...
> > 
> > <<<<<<< current version
> > # $FreeBSD: src/etc/rc.d/nisdomain,v 1.5.2.2 2013/03/28 13:02:44 svnexp Exp $
> > =======
> > # $FreeBSD: releng/9.3/etc/rc.d/nisdomain 193197 2009-06-01 04:55:13Z dougb $
> > >>>>>>> 9.3-RELEASE
> > 
> > And then, after all these edits, I had to wade through entering
> > y to "Does this look reasonable (y/n)?" for all these files!
> > This is of course a necessary step to avoid being bitten by
> > any <<< === >>> lines left behind by mistake (easy to do when
> > you lose your concentration after more than a hundred files),
> > but most of this step could be entirely avoided by automatically
> > accepting the ID changes.
> > (I amused myself by counting all files during this stage.
> > I had to answer y to about 320 files, most of which only
> > had changes in the ID.)
> > 
> > This was my first upgrade from 8.4 to 9.3. I have 30 more to go
> > before the 8.4 EoL this summer. I see 30 completely unnecessarily
> > wasted hours in my future...
> > And think of the combined lost man hours worldwide in these upgrades!
> > Merge seems to be a really stupid choice for major upgrades.
> > (Unless of course there is some flag to freebsd-update which makes
> > this kind of change automatically accepted. But I see no such flag
> > in man freebsd-update in 8.4, 9.3 or 10.1.)
> > 
> > And yes, I could maybe copy most of /etc from the first
> > upgraded server to the rest of them before upgrading, but
> > that seems error-prone and not really a good solution for
> > every FreeBSD user.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Peter Olsson
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