On Wed, 2015-07-22 at 19:47 -0400, Ian Stakenvicius wrote: > > Sent from an iPhone, sorry for the HTML... > > > On Jul 22, 2015, at 5:38 PM, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > > > On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Joakim Tjernlund > > <joakim.tjernl...@transmode.se> wrote: > > > > > > There can not be any manual merges after an SW update here. > > > > > > I started to look at INSTALL_MASK, what if I set INSTALL_MASK > > > to point to all conf files I want to manage myself. > > > Then /etc/inittab etc. will not be touched when updating init > > > > This sounds like overkill. > > > > If you've already installed a custom /etc/inittab, then when you > > emerge init, it won't overwrite your inittab even if you don't change > > anything in your portage config. emerge won't touch any files in /etc > > unless they don't already exist. > > > ..AND have been modified. IIRC if the hash of the config files match what > they were when the package was > previously emerged, then the files are updated aren't they? > > I expect that this is fine in the situation described, but it's worth knowing > that a config file left > unmodified may be replaced with a different vanilla config file later on.
Sure, but what if I need to change a conf file in an installed system? Or rebuild a a system from scratch? The user only runs a one SW update command to update an installed system in the field and cannot edit a bunch of files too. Especially when there are hundreds of systems sitting in remote locations. This is why I need a way change conf files automatically and I want to use ebuilds/profile as far as possible. I think there is room for some improvement here in portage to allow this kind of customization. Jocke