| 1 |
On Tuesday 01 July 2003 23:29, Owen Gunden wrote: |
| 2 |
> On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 05:32:56PM +0100, Toby Dickenson wrote: |
| 3 |
> > On Tuesday 01 July 2003 16:49, Josep Sanjuas wrote: |
| 4 |
> > > I think there could be more advantages. |
| 5 |
> > |
| 6 |
> > they dont seem very compelling..... |
| 7 |
> |
| 8 |
> There is one compelling advantage that I believe was intended by the |
| 9 |
> original poster. That is this: in the current situation, when I upgrade |
| 10 |
> baselayout I get a new make.conf which I have to merge by hand. In my |
| 11 |
> experience this is definitely the hardest file in /etc to merge because of |
| 12 |
> its size and the amount of customization I've done to it. If it were split |
| 13 |
> into separate files, it would be easier to see where the new stuff is. |
| 14 |
> Also, I would be familiar with the particular sections that I'd made |
| 15 |
> changes to, so I could simply copy the maintainers version of any files |
| 16 |
> that I know I haven't changed. |
| 17 |
|
| 18 |
I am proposing that we can get the same advantages by creating a better merge |
| 19 |
tool. That is, a merge tool specifically designed for merging configuration |
| 20 |
files. (but definitely not a ufed-style file-specific tool) |
| 21 |
|
| 22 |
I spent some time last night merging make.conf... I think the problem is that |
| 23 |
sdiff (the tool used by etc-update) is using the standard diff algorithm that |
| 24 |
minimises diff size. This leads to it selecting chunks of differences that |
| 25 |
often dont "look right" to the etc-update user. The chunks of differences are |
| 26 |
very different to what you would get if you asked a human to isolate the |
| 27 |
differences between the two files. |
| 28 |
|
| 29 |
I think the merging task would be much easier with a tool that found more |
| 30 |
useful chunks of differences. Perhaps something using Python's difflib |
| 31 |
module? Any feedback gratefully accepted. |
| 32 |
|
| 33 |
difflib can be found in cvs here. Check out the comment that starts |
| 34 |
"SequenceMatcher is a flexible class for comparing...." |
| 35 |
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/python/python/dist/src/Lib/difflib.py?rev=1 |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
|
| 38 |
|
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
-- |
| 41 |
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
Archives