tags 404861 -moreinfo
thanks
Frank Küster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Paul Slootman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>> > IMHO, comments should
>>> > be preserved,
>>>
>>> Often this is possible using sed on the configuration file.
>>
>> The thing is, upstream provides a quite complicated perl script to
>> handle the upgrades; and that script is pretty good at doing that,
>> apart from the fact that comments aren't preserved.
>> It will be very difficult to make it preserve comments, if not
>> impossible.
>
> I looked at the script - it *has* clever code to preserve comments.
Sorry, I was wrong here: It has code to extract the comments from the
*new* version of the file and mix them with the updated non-comment
parts.
Which sounds like a very clever idea; outdated comments explaining
outdated syntax are harmful. Still, user-provided comments are
worthwile preserving.
Maybe using ucf and it's --three-way merging option could help here. I
have no experience, though, whether this can be used if the version we
upgrade from did not use this option. But in any case, it might be a
good idea to get a version of wwwoffle into etch that uses ucf
--three-way for wwwoffle.conf, so that this bug can finaly be resolved
post-etch. The general scheme for this would be:
- copy existing /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf to a temporary directory
- let upgrade-wwwoffle.pl handle this tempfile to produce the default
new file
- call
ucf --three-way $tempdir/wwwoffle.conf /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf
This will not ask any question if there are no comment changes. If
there are, it will show a diff where one version has only
old-package-comments+user-comments, and the other has
new-package-comments.
Plust the usual things in "postrm purge", checking whether ucf is still
there.
Unless ucf itself provides options to do a three-way merge when used for
the first time, it could be tweaked to do it like this:
- ship the old default wwwoffle.conf in the deb
- in postinst, do
mv /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf /etc/wwwoffle/backup/wwwoffle.conf
ucf --three-way old.default.wwoffle.conf /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf
cp /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf $tmpdir/wwwoffle.conf
update-wwwoffle.pl # acts on $tmpdir/wwwoffle.conf
# produces $tmpdir/new.default.wwoffle.conf
mv /etc/wwwoffle/backup/wwwoffle.conf /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf
ucf --three-way $tmpdir/new.default.wwoffle.conf /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf
# this asks questions about comment changes
(untested, and I'm going on vacation in a couple of hours).
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
