[gentoo-dev] etc-update

[Brian Harring <bdharring@wisc.edu>]

While I'm on an emailing spree, anyone got any ideas on how to make etc-update 
a bit less painful?
It seems like a lot of the times where etc-update requires user intervention 
it's fairly minor- case in point, make.conf, when the default/base-layout 
make.conf gets updated.  It seems like it usually chokes on configured 
options, features or gentoo_mirrors as an example.

What if we were to either A) maintain a listing of default conf files (when 
modifying/adding a conf file, make.conf again, store it somewhere), or B) 
pull the conf from the distfile in some way?  The reason I ask is it strikes 
me if etc-update where able to compare the old default conf against the 
current conf it might be able to create a diff it could use to patch against 
the new one.  A bit wordy, but basically I'm wondering if we could isolate 
the changes a user has made, and attempt to merge those changes into the new 
conf file via a diff.
The problem I see with this would be that where (say GENTOO_MIRRORS) gets 
updated to some new default setting, the generated diff wouldn't be able to 
match against the new conf.
Thoughts?
~harring
bdharring@wisc.edu

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