> >   2)  What's the best way to examine /etc and
> >       resolve differences between old and
> >       upgraded files?  In particular, is there
> >       anything like FreeBSD's "mergemaster"?
> 
> I didn't know what the FreeBSD mergemaster was. Its man page says:
> 
>      ... When the script finds a change in the new file, or there is
>      no installed version of the new file it gives you four options to
>      deal with it.  You can install the new file as is, delete the new
>      file, merge the old and new files (as appropriate) using sdiff(1) or
>      leave the file in the temporary root environment to merge by hand
>      later. ...
> 
> This is similar to Debian's routines for upgrading packages. I think a
> solution like this would be excellent. Is anyone working on anything like
> this (use old, use new, show differences, merge differences, or manually
> do later)??

mergemaster should ``just work'' in NetBSD if the tag string is 
changed to NetBSD (although I must admit I haven't tried it yet).  
The only requisite is that the files in /etc actually have Id 
strings.  This was a bit of a pain to update before mergemaster was 
imported into the FreeBSD tree (you have to spend ages finding out if 
you're going to break anything by adding comments to various config 
files - I'm still not convinced the yp file generation stuff is 100% 
when there are comments in /etc/passwd & /etc/group)... :-/

>    Jeremy C. Reed
>    http://www.reedmedia.net/

-- 
Brian <brian@Awfulhak.org>                        <brian@[uk.]FreeBSD.org>
      <http://www.Awfulhak.org>                   <brian@[uk.]OpenBSD.org>
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour !