On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 15:24 -0400, Neal Becker wrote: > I was quite interested when I saw the announcement of conary, which solves > this problem by allowing local changes tracked as patches. > > It occurs to me that we can get most of the benefit if rpm is modified to do > two things. > > 1) Don't create needless .rpmsave/.rpmnew if there is no change This is a bug. When I first started using rpm it followed its documented behaviour... which is to not create these files. Recently (and by recently I mean sometime in the RHL era :-) some packages have begun to create rpmsave/rpmnew where the md5sum of the config files are the same between packages. Bugs have been filed with discouraging results. Here's one that definitely references this issue: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=188100 This one touches on the same "user interface" issues and may be easy to fix at the same time: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29470 I believe this is one of them (a bug originally filed against rpm. The problem was misunderstood and retargetted it against the package itself. The package owner attempted to "fix it" and the problem became worse on the tester's system.) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=176248 I didn't go digging through the CLOSED bugs but there may be other cases where the former Red Hat rpm maintainer misunderstood the problem and closed the bug as well. > 2) Attempt to merge changes, in the manner of a modern revision control > system. > This won't work. Merging changes to config files can't be done automatically, 1) it has to be done with knowledge of what the program that uses the config file expects to find. 2) it often has to know what the system adminsitrator intended when they modified the config file. Without those pieces of information, a tool that automaticaly merges changes is most likely going to cause extensive breakage. -Toshio
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