Hi,

I've wrote a similar thing.
Btw it's more a quick hack than a complete end-user solution but it
works fine.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~gmsoft/tools/gm-etc-update

To use it you _MUST_ first have a clean system and run it once.
That means no file have to be updated via etc-update when you run it for
the first time because it have to build the MD5 database.

Once this is done, simply run it but beware :
-It will update unmodified files without asking
-It will update "trivial updates" withour asking
-It may not be bugless but I use it on ~10 box here and it always worked
as expected

Enjoy :)


On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 12:43:26 +0200
"Joerg Hoh" <joerg@devone.org> wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
> 
> -- 
> Fachbegriffe der Informatik (Nr 152): PORN
> - Poster Ohne Richtigen Namen 
> 
> 


-- 
Guy Martin
Gentoo Linux - HPPA port Lead / IPv6 team
Lug Charleroi (Belgium)