Siju George wrote:
Hi,
I followed
http://www.openbsd.com/faq/upgrade45.html
and upgraded from my OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5
I applied the patch file "upgrade45.patch" correctly.
but when I ran sysmerge as said in the "final steps" section
it again showed differences between the installed versions and
temporary versions of the above patched files.
Why is that? is it normal? Yes I omitted the -C option during patch.
Look closely at the differences...and tell me if you think they
count...
sysmerge and the patch file and manual updating will generally give
different results, but hopefully only in insignificant ways.
One glaring issue is the $OpenBSD$ CVS ID tags on files. Those are
deliberately ignored by the patch file, they are obsessed over by
sysmerge. I ignore the CVS tags because if someone manually updates a
file mid-cycle, they generally won't update the CVS tag, they will just
make whatever functional change needs to be made. I don't like patch
files that don't apply for totally unimportant reasons.
Some files, like /etc/group and /etc/master.passwd will end up out of
order compared to the "stock" files. I don't like how sysmerge handles
the group and password files, but I haven't got around to writing a
better handler.
If you use both sysmerge and the patch file, you will see differences in
how they work. Sysmerge tries to make everything look like a new stock
install. The patch files try to make the changes that really count, and
ignore the cosmetic stuff that can only cause problems. For example,
what if you have a pf.conf file which is serving you perfectly, but it
has a five year old $OpenBSD$ tag? Should ANYTHING change that tag (or
the file)? I don't think so...the contents of the file no longer
resemble ANY revision of the stock file. On the other hand, if the
install was five years old and never had used PF, but today you want to
start using PF today, it would be best to start with the newest version
of pf.conf as an example.
You gotta keep your brain involved....
Nick.
