Re: idea bouncing: using cvs as a replacement for mergemaster

From: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:45:26 +1030
Sender: owner-freebsd-current@xxxxxxxxxxx

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
On 2007-11-27 22:45, "Aryeh M. Friedman" <aryeh.friedman@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I was thinking seeing the fact that I already have a cvs repo of
- -current does it make sense to just use CVS to update /etc
instead of mergemaster... if so any ideas on doing it cleanly?

It may work, but it doesn't ``scale'' to dozens of machines, and you
still have to do merging when upstream files (the ones in the FreeBSD
repository) change. It's not particularly hard to merge with CVS, if
you consider the src/etc files of FreeBSD a ``vendor branch'', but
it's not exactly a fun ride either.

etcmerge does a 3 way merge which makes most updates almost completely
painless.. It does need to be taught to special case certain files tho
(ie all of the ones derived from others like spwd.db, aliases.db, etc)
but apart from that it is very nice.

It is a port - sysutils/etcmerge.

Another simple solution, which needs more publicity, is 'mergemaster
-U'. I do my updates using -Ui and seldom have to deal any manual
merge. It's not perfect as I still need to deal with locally modified
files, but "it's good enough".
--
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman@xxxxxx Phone: +1 510 486-8634
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