On Sunday 24 October 2004 05:18, Ed Grimm wrote:
> Excluding program directories (for example, /etc/init.d), all changes to
> existing /etc files should compensate for changes that the local
> administrator has made.  For example, when upgrading a configuration
> file, the new version should, as much as possible, retain the changes
> that the local administrator has made.  When the ext3 filesystem tools
> add a new option, any attempts to update /etc/fstab should ignore any
> partitions that aren't ext3.  It should not add any partitions that it
> feels are missing, either due to having ignored a reiserfs partition or
> due to that partition not being there.  It should not alter any swap
> partitions that haven't been modified according to a change the ext3
> maintainer previously saw - it's possible it may have not been installed
> here, it's possible the administrator backed it out.  It should NEVER
> try to change the partition type (for example, from ext3 to xfs, like it
> currently wants to do.)

This is what dispatch-conf will do if you give it time to work. For 
dispatch-conf to work you need to initialise it first. It works with 
three-way diffs, so without a reference (which gets created the first time a 
config file is updated with dispatch-conf) it doesn't work. For the rest, I 
suggest you write up a patch to dispatch-conf to allow it to ignore certain 
files. However it normally works quite well with fstab as the default one 
hardly changes, and you'd want to know about those changes anyway.

> If people are interested, I could potentially write a tutorial on
> methods one could utilize to perform such functions.  Note that this
> would be written to writing the code in perl, as I don't know python
> well, and it doesn't feel natural to me.

Well, go ahead

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net