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?
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 _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
