On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 03:40:33AM +0300, Jarno Elonen wrote: > http://elonen.iki.fi/code/dpkg-merge/ contains the patched dpkg > and a new interactive python & curses based two-way merge tool > called imediff2 (+ 3 screenshots for the impatient).
Why two-way merge instead of three-way? The problem with the traditional two way merge is that it is impossible to distinguish what changes have been made locally vs what changes have been made upstream. So I am often left wondering: Is this an important change I made? Or is this a critical change upstream made? Typically, when resolving conflicts in conffiles while updating packages, I would like to do one of the following (depending on where the most changes are) manually or semi-automatically: 1. get the diff of all local changes, and apply them to the new upstream version. This would be idea if few local changes have been made, and would work (manually at least) even if large changes have been made to the upstream. 2. get the diff of all upstream changes, and apply then to the local version. This would be best of the local version has big changes, but the upstream version doesn't change much. Unfortunately neither is currently possible at the moment, simply because dpkg doesn't save a copy of the last installed config file anywhere. (Note: I use upstream here to mean either the upstream author or the Debian package maintainer). -- Brian May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
