On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 20:32:35 -0700
Andy Ruhl <acruhl@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:31:01 +1100, Luke Mewburn <lukem@netbsd.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 04:01:06PM -0800, Roger Fischer wrote:
> >   | Is "etcupdate" part of "postinstall"  It looks like they do a lot of the
> >   | same things.
> > 
> > postinstall identifies issues that need to be fixed in an upgrade
> > for the newer system to function correctly.  Many of these issues
> > can be fixed by postinstall.  It makes no effort to merge other
> > changes.  postinstall should be a mandatory minimum step performed
> > during an upgraded.
> > 
> > etcupdate helps merge changes in the startup & user-editable
> > configuration files in /etc.  It calls postinstall as a convenience.
> 
> What if I pretty much know what I need in /etc?
> 
> Meaning, I just do cp -r etc etc.old, then extract the new sets, then
> just fix the stuff I need to fix. Usually the passwd (pwd.db), group,
> hosts, rc.conf, and startup scripts are the big ones, and I wrote down
> the rest of the stuff which I don't have in front of me right now.
> 
> Seems simpler to me than trying to merge everything. And if something
> breaks, I have the old stuff in the copied directory.
> 
> Oh yeah, and I do dumps of all filesystems before just in case as
> well... Only had to restore from dumps once.
> 
> Andy

postinstall checks things outside of /etc, e.g. /dev stuff. Even if you do 
what you described above, you're still going to want to run postinstall, 
but the etcupdate program from pkgsrc become less important. 

As others have pointed out, /etc/update calls postinstall, but I think it does
at the end of the process. Postinstall is fast and easy, so I usually run it
ASAP to fix things like missing groups and devices to keep the window 
of time where things are pretty messed up down to a minimum. etcupdate 
require more time and concentration.

-- 
Harry Waddell
Caravan Electronic Publishing
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