Re: [gentoo-dev] Managing etc/* in an embbeded system

[Joakim Tjernlund]

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 <rich0@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Joakim Tjernlund
> > <joakim.tjernlund@×××××××××.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