On 11/04/2010 09:03 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Nikos Chantziaras<rea...@arcor.de> wrote:
On 11/04/2010 06:43 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
[...]
Looking around at VMware's site they recommend changing
/etc/sysctl.conf to enable the feature:
[...]
I can do that but I'm pretty sure that if I edit that file then
I'll lose the edits some day when doing etc-update's.
Gentoo will never overwrite your /etc config files. New files are created
with an "._" prefix. When that happens, portage tells you that "N files in
/etc/ need updating." At that point, you either manually merge the changes
or use a tool like "dispatch-conf" (I recommend this one) or "etc-update".
And until you do so, the old files will be used.
Yes, thanks Nikos. I do understand that part.
I tried dispatch-conf years ago and couldn't get the hang of it. It
was not clear to me what was old/new and all the rest of that.
My worry with etc-update is that I know, for the most part, all the
files I modify when doing an install so I know what to look for when
I'm selecting files to replace myself. However with that tool there's
a point where you might have 20 files that need updating, you look at
the list and nothing looks like what I changed and you hit -5 to tell
it to do everything. I know I'm going to overwrite sysctl.conf that
way because it's not in my mental list.
Specifically for sysctl.conf, when you open it, you will see this at the
bottom of it:
# YOUR OWN CUSTOM STUFF BELOW
That means it's very easy to copy whatever you inserted at the end, do
the update, and then paste it back.
Also, I have a modified sysctl.conf too (a swapiness tweak), but
updating baselayout (the package that owns that file) didn't actually
install a new copy of it, presumably because all my changes were below
the "YOUR OWN STUFF" line. Many ebuilds are smart about updating /etc
files; and sometimes, they don't install new ones, but directly modify
existing ones to selectively add or remove stuff.
