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On Sunday 24 October 2004 05:18, Ed Grimm wrote: |
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> Excluding program directories (for example, /etc/init.d), all changes to |
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> existing /etc files should compensate for changes that the local |
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> administrator has made. For example, when upgrading a configuration |
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> file, the new version should, as much as possible, retain the changes |
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> that the local administrator has made. When the ext3 filesystem tools |
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> add a new option, any attempts to update /etc/fstab should ignore any |
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> partitions that aren't ext3. It should not add any partitions that it |
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> feels are missing, either due to having ignored a reiserfs partition or |
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> due to that partition not being there. It should not alter any swap |
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> partitions that haven't been modified according to a change the ext3 |
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> maintainer previously saw - it's possible it may have not been installed |
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> here, it's possible the administrator backed it out. It should NEVER |
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> try to change the partition type (for example, from ext3 to xfs, like it |
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> currently wants to do.) |
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|
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This is what dispatch-conf will do if you give it time to work. For |
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dispatch-conf to work you need to initialise it first. It works with |
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three-way diffs, so without a reference (which gets created the first time a |
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config file is updated with dispatch-conf) it doesn't work. For the rest, I |
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suggest you write up a patch to dispatch-conf to allow it to ignore certain |
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files. However it normally works quite well with fstab as the default one |
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hardly changes, and you'd want to know about those changes anyway. |
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|
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> If people are interested, I could potentially write a tutorial on |
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> methods one could utilize to perform such functions. Note that this |
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> would be written to writing the code in perl, as I don't know python |
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> well, and it doesn't feel natural to me. |
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|
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Well, go ahead |
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|
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-- |
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Paul de Vrieze |
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Gentoo Developer |
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Mail: pauldv@g.o |
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Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net |