[gentoo-dev] RFC: extension of etc-update

[Joerg Hoh]

Hi

I'm unhappy with the etc-update script. In my eyes it lacks at least one
necessary feature:

Detection of unmodified config-files

When I recently updated my sytem, it gave me more than 200 files to look
at. That is impossible, since in most cases I never heard of such a file
(and therefor I don't undestand what that file means). So I did a quick
look over the list, found nothing relevant to me and and did "-5". Well,
after that I wonderd why my mails were rejected. Oh, I've overseen
/etc/ssmtp.conf! Bad thing, with the default config it doesn't work.

My proposal is that we keep a list of configfiles and their md5 hashes.
etc-update maintains this list. We now have several cases:

* etc-update detects that we emerged a package which wasn't present and we
  have new config files. So etc-update does the md5-hashing and puts the
  hash into the hash-file.
* etc-update want's to install a new config-file and an 
  config-file is already present. Then it hashes the present config-file
  and compares the hash to the hash already present in the hash-file.
  - If the hashes differs, it asks the user what to do (as it now happens
    with every config-file). If the user wants to replace the old,
    user-modified config-file with the new one, the hash for the new
    config-file is written to the hash-file.
  - If the hashes are identical, it replaces the old config-file with the
    new one and updates the hash-file.

I've looked at the etc-update script, but since I'm not good at
shell-scripting, I decided to rewrite it in python. Not all is done yet,
and I don't wanto to do unneeded work if someone wants to enhance the
shell-script.

You find my python version at http://www.devone.org/linux/gentoo.html

Another extension would be versioning of configuration files via cvs/rcs,
subversion or arch. But I had to do some more work on that ...

Joerg, mostly happy gentoo user


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